Where Human Pathways End

by Shamus Frazer

  WHERE HUMAN

  PATHWAYS END

  Tales of the Dead and the un-Dead

  Bethink thee: every enticing league thou wend

  Beyond the mark where life its bound hath set

  Will lead thee at length where human pathways end

  And the dark enemy spreads his maddening net.

  Walter de la Mare

  Ash-Tree Press

  WHERE HUMAN PATHWAYS END

  ISBN: 9781553103042 (Kindle edition)

  ISBN: 9781553103059 (ePub edition)

  Published by Christopher Roden

  for Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm

  First electronic edition 2013

  First Ash-Tree Press edition 2001

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  This edition © Ash-Tree Press 2013

  Stories © Joan Neale Frazer

  Introduction © Richard Dalby

  Jacket art © Paul Lowe

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is first published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Richard Dalby

  Florinda

  Mr Nicholas Loses Grip

  The Yew Tree

  The Tune in Dan’s Café

  The Fifth Mask

  The Cyclops Juju

  The Deepest Lady in Singapore

  Walking on Air

  Khorassim

  Obituary

  The Tree

  Sources

  WHERE HUMAN

  PATHWAYS END

  Introduction

  I FIRST DISCOVERED THE name of ‘Shamus Frazer’ in two different books separated by a gap of more than thirty years: on the dust-jacket of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934), the complete rear cover panel was devoted to laudatory reviews of Shamus Frazer’s first two novels Acorned Hog and Porcelain People, where he was acclaimed as Waugh’s natural successor, a master of satirical irony.

  Howard Spring in The Evening Standard wrote: ‘I must confess that till now Mr Waugh seems to me to have been the only effective purveyor of these modernist souffles; but at a single stride Mr Shamus Frazer is alongside of him. . . . You end with the feeling that you have met a young man whose work is bound to count’; while L. A. G. Strong in The Spectator declared: ‘I take my hat off to Mr Shamus Frazer who has produced a first novel of surprising quality. He has wit, invention, confidence, and he says what he thinks.’

  At the same time I acquired Charles Birkin’s two paperback anthologies (both published in 1965) which together contained no less than four excellent and disturbing supernatural tales by Shamus Frazer: ‘Florinda’ and ‘The Yew Tree’ in The Tandem Book of Ghost Stories, and ‘The Fifth Mask’ and ‘The Cyclops Juju’ in The Tandem Book of Horror Stories.

  In his introduction to the latter volume, Birkin wrote: ‘Shamus Frazer—a welcome newcomer—has produced a memorable piece in “The Cyclops Juju” which is set in the unusual background of a boys’ preparatory school, and possesses a sinister impact somewhat similar to William Golding’s magnificent novel Lord of the Flies.’

  At first I assumed that Shamus Frazer—the acclaimed novelist of 1933/4—and Shamus Frazer—the ‘welcome newcomer’ of 1965—must be two quite different people, possibly father and son, but I eventually deduced that they were actually one and the same writer. Biographical information on Frazer was virtually non-existent as he appeared in no writers’ reference books after a solitary brief entry in 1934.

  While placing one of his ghost stories—‘Florinda’—between hard covers for the first time, in Chillers for Christmas (1989), I was delighted to become acquainted with the author’s widow, Joan Neale Frazer. Not only did she supply much information about her late husband’s life, she also sent me the typescript of his complete collection of ‘tales of the Dead and the un-Dead’, Where Human Pathways End, half of which had never been published.

  Shamus was born James Ian Arbuthnot Frazer in 1912, of mixed Irish/Scottish parentage, and raised at Christchurch Vicarage, Doncaster, in South Yorkshire. Winning a Modern History Scholarship to Oxford, he wrote the first of his highly flippant and satirical novels, Acorned Hog, during his first year there. It was published by Chapman & Hall in 1933, when he was barely twenty-one, and quickly reprinted.

  It was followed by Porcelain People (1934)—the hero is a partly autobiographical young Oxford man who becomes involved in a whirlpool of comic and exciting adventures, and ‘the final effect is one of inexhaustible entertainment, as confused and baffling as a midsummer nightmare’—and several more novels, all published by Chapman & Hall: A Shroud as well as a Shirt (1935), Goodnight Sweet Ladies (1940), the antediluvian fantasy Blow Blow Your Trumpets (1945), and Barbary Court (1948).

  Among the many appreciative reviews of his work were: ‘Mr Frazer has a freshness, wit and spirit all his own’ (Cyril Connolly); ‘Mr Frazer seems to me to improve with each novel he writes’ (James Hilton); ‘I hope Mr Frazer is a fast writer for I should like some more and should like it very soon’ (Punch); and ‘Mr Frazer seems to be a master of technique almost at the first attempt . . . and the reader is led on by the hand, or by the nose, with suave and rather wicked assurance’ (John o’London’s Weekly). Ralph Straus (in The Sunday Times) called him ‘an imaginative writer of no little distinction’.

  After leaving Oxford, Frazer taught history and English at Clayesmore Preparatory School (not unlike the school described in ‘The Cyclops Juju’). He married Joan Neale in 1939, and they had two sons. During the war he served with the Marines in Egypt, India, and Belgium.

  In 1946 he taught at Bethany School in Kent, then spent over twelve years with his family in Singapore as a lecturer at the Teachers’ Training College and the University of Malaya.

  His final—and most popular—book, The Crocodile Dies Twice; or, The Boy Who Disappeared, was published by the Kuala Lumpur branch of Oxford University Press in 1954. It has remained a standard ‘Readers’ school text in Malaya ever since, and is now in its eighteenth edition. He also wrote several other children’s stories and much poetry.

  During his years there Frazer became well known as the ‘A. J. Alan of Singapore’, reading one of his ghost stories and other bizarre tales over Radio Malaya every Christmas Eve (the equivalent of BBC’s later ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’).

  His best ghost story, ‘Florinda’, first saw print in the twenty-ninth number of the London Mystery magazine in June 1956, followed by ‘The Fifth Mask’ (No. 33, June 1957) and ‘The Yew Tree’ (No. 39, December 1958). Ramsey Campbell recalls that ‘The Fifth Mask’ was a seminal influence on his own budding literary career when he first read it in London Mystery during his early teens, and this distinctly ‘Campbellian’ weird tale was included in his U.S. anthology Fine Frights (1988).

  After returning to England and settling in Kent, Frazer lived just long enough to see the inclusion of all three stories, plus ‘The Cyclops Juju’, in Charles Birkin’s twin anthologies, The Tandem Book of Ghost Stories and The Tandem Book of Hor
ror Stories (both 1965), reissued in New York by the Paperback Library under the respective titles of The Haunted Dancers and The Witch Baiter (both 1967).

  Shamus Frazer died suddenly from cancer, aged only fifty-four, on 20 May 1966, at the Kent & Sussex Hospital in Tunbridge Wells.

  Like Frederick Cowles before him, Frazer had spent the last months of his life typing up a complete collection of supernatural tales for publication, entitled Where Human Pathways End. In 1967 one of these ghost stories, ‘The Tune in Dan’s Café’, was taken by Herbert Van Thal for one of his lesser-known paperback anthologies, Lie Ten Nights Awake (Hodder, 1967). Curiously, Van Thal never included any of Frazer’s stories in the Pan Books of Horror Stories: the unpublished ‘Khorassim’ and ‘Obituary’ would have been especially ideal for this horrific series.

  ‘The Tune in Dan’s Café’ was televised in Rod Serling’s Night Gallery series, first shown on 5 January 1972, starring Pernell Roberts and Susan Oliver as Joe and Kelly Bellman, with James Nusser as Dan.

  While ‘Florinda’ continues to reappear in new anthologies, most recently Great Ghost Stories (Readers Digest, 1997) and Twelve Stories of the Supernatural (Oxford University Press, 1997)—the latter with a fine illustration of the evil Florinda on the front cover—the publication of Frazer’s complete collection is long overdue.

  The complete Collected Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh did not appear in its entirety until the Everyman’s Library hardback edition (1997)—and now the full collection of bizarre short stories by ‘Waugh’s natural successor’ is published here for the first time.

  Richard Dalby

  Scarborough

  December 2000

  Florinda

  ‘DID YOU AND Miss Reeve have a lovely walk, darling?’ Clare asked of the child in the tarnished depths of glass before her.

  ‘Well, it was lovely for me but not for Miss Reeve, because she tore her stocking on a bramble, and it bled.’

  ‘The stocking?’

  ‘No, that ran a beautiful ladder,’ said Jane very solemnly. ‘But there were two long tears on her leg as if a cat had scratched her. We were going along the path by the lake when the brambles caught her. She almost fell in. She did look funny, Mummy, hopping on the bank like a hen blackbird a cat’s playing with—and squawking.’

  ‘Poor Miss Reeve! . . . Your father’s going to have that path cleared soon; it’s quite overgrown.’

  ‘Oh, I hope not soon, Mummy. I love the brambly places, and what the birds and rabbits’ll do if they’re cut down I can’t imagine. The thickety bushes are all hopping and fluttering with them when you walk. And the path wriggles as if it were living, too—so you must lift your feet high and stamp on it, the way Florinda does. . . .’

  But Clare was not listening any more. She had withdrawn her glance from Jane’s grave elfin features in the shadowed recesses of the glass to fix it on her own image, spread as elegantly upon its surface as a swan.

  ‘And if Daddy has the bushes cut down,’ Jane went on, ‘what will poor Florinda do? Where will she play? There will be no place at all for the little traps and snares she sets; no place for her to creep and whistle in, and tinkle into laughter when something funny happens—like Miss Reeve caught by the leg and hopping.’ This was the time, when her mother was not listening, that Jane could talk most easily about Florinda. She looked at her mother’s image, wrapt in the dull mysteries of grown-up thought within the oval Chippendale glass—and thence to the rococo frame of gilded wood in whose interlacing design two birds of faded gilt, a bat with a chipped wing, and flowers whose golden petals and leaves showed here and there little spots and tips of white plaster like a disease, were all caught for ever.

  ‘That’s how I met Florinda.’ She was chattering quite confidently, now that she knew that it was only to herself. ‘I had been down to the edge of the lake where there are no brambles—you know, the lawn side; and I knelt down to look at myself in the water, and there were two of me. That’s what I thought at first—two of me. And then I saw one was someone else—it was Florinda, smiling at me; but I couldn’t smile back, not for anything. There we were like you and me in the glass—one smiling and one very solemn. Then Miss Reeves called and Florinda just went—and my face was alone and astonished in the water. She’s shy, Florinda is—and sly, too. Shy and sly—that’s Florinda for you.’

  The repeated name stirred Clare to a vague consciousness: she had heard it on Jane’s lips before.

  ‘Who is Florinda?’ she asked.

  ‘Mummy, I’ve told you. She’s a doll, I think, only large, large as me. And she never talks—not with words, anyway. And her eyes can’t shut even when she lies down.’

  ‘I thought she was called Arabella.’

  ‘That’s the doll Uncle Richard gave me last Christmas. Arabella does close her eyes when she lies down, and she says “Good night, Mamma,” too, because of the gramophone record inside her. But Florinda’s different. She’s not a house doll. She belongs outside—though I have asked her to come to tea on Christmas Eve.’

  ‘Well, darling, I’ve lots of letters to write, so just you run along to the nursery and have a lovely tea.’

  So Florinda was a doll—an ideal doll, it seemed, that Jane had invented in anticipation of Christmas. Nine in the New Year, Jane was growing perhaps a little old for dolls. A strange child, thought Clare, difficult to understand. In that she took after her mother—though in looks it was her father she resembled. With a sigh Clare slid out the drawer of the mahogany writing-desk. She distributed writing-paper and envelopes, the Christmas cards (reproductions of Alken prints), in neat piles over the red leather—and, opening her address-book, set herself to write.

  Roger came in with the early December dusk. He had been tramping round the estate with Wakefield the agent, and the cold had painted his cheeks blue and nipped his nose red so that he looked like a large, clumsy gnome. He kissed Clare on the nape, and the icy touch of his nose spread gooseflesh over her shoulders.

  ‘You go and pour yourself a whisky,’ she said, ‘and thaw yourself out by the fire. I’ll be with you in a minute.’ She addressed two more envelopes in her large clear hand, and then, without looking round, said: ‘Have we bitten off rather more than we can chew?’

  ‘There’s an awful lot to be done,’ said her husband from the fire, ‘so much one hardly knows where to begin. The woods are a shambles—Nissen huts, nastiness, and barbed wire. One would have thought Uncle Eustace would have made some effort to clear up the mess after the army moved out. . . .’

  ‘But, darling, he never came back to live here. He was too wise.’

  ‘Too ill and too old—and he never gave a thought to those who’d inherit the place, I suppose.’

  ‘He never thought we’d be foolish enough to come and live here, anyway.’

  Roger’s uncle had died in a nursing-home in Bournemouth earlier in the year, and Roger had come into these acres of Darkshire park and woodland, and the sombre peeling house, Fowling Hall, set among them. At Clare’s urging he had tried to sell the place, but there were no offers. And now Roger had the obstinate notion of settling here, and trying to make pigs and chickens pay for the upkeep of the estate. Of course, Clare knew, there was something else behind this recent interest in the country life. Nothing had been said, but she knew what Roger wanted, and she knew, too, that he would hint at it again before long—the forbidden subject. She stacked her letters on the desk and went to join him by the fire.

  ‘There’s one thing you can do,’ she said. ‘Clear that path that goes round the lake. Poor Miss Reeve tore herself quite nastily on a bramble this afternoon, walking there.’

  ‘I’ll remind Wakefield to get the men on the job tomorrow. And what was Jane doing down by the lake just now as I came in? I called her and she ran off into the bushes.’

  ‘My dear, Jane’s been up in the nursery for the last hour or more. Miss Reeve’s reading to her. You know, she’s not allowed out this raw weather except when the sun’s up. The d
octor said——’

  ‘Well, I wondered . . . I only glimpsed her—a little girl in the dusk. She ran off when I called.’

  ‘One of the workmen’s children, I expect.’

  ‘Perhaps. . . . Strange, I didn’t think of that.’

  He took a gulp of whisky, and changed the subject: ‘Clare, it’s going to cost the earth to put this place properly in order. It would be worth it if . . . if . . .’ He added with an effort, ‘I mean, if one thought it was leading anywhere. . . .’

  So it had come out, the first hint.

  ‘You mean if we had a son, don’t you? . . . Don’t you, Roger?’ She spoke accusingly.

  ‘I merely meant. . . . Well, yes—though, of course——’

  She didn’t let him finish. ‘But you know what the doctor said after Jane. You know how delicate she is. . . . You can’t want ——?’

  ‘If she had a brother——’ Roger began.

  Clare laughed, a sudden shiver of laughter, and held her hands to the fire.

  ‘Roger, what an open hypocrite you are! “If she had a brother,” when all the time you mean “if I had a son.” And how could you be certain it wouldn’t be a sister? No, Roger, we’ve had this out a thousand times in the past. It can’t be done.’ She shook her head and blinked at the fire. ‘It wouldn’t work out.’

  Roger went into the nursery, as was his too irregular custom, to say goodnight to Jane. She was in her pink fleecy dressing-gown, slippered toes resting on the wire fender, a bowl emptied of bread and milk on her knees. Miss Reeve was reading her a story about a princess who was turned by enchantment into a fox.