The Treasury Of The Fantastic

by David Sandner

  “Drink?” said shoemaker hopefully, for we all like company in our misfortunes, and butcher nodded grimly.

  “The young noodle,” he said, emptying his tankard.

  Well, after that I kept my ears open, and it was the same story all over the village. There was hardly a young man among all the ghosts of Fairfield who didn’t roll home in the small hours of the morning the worse for liquor. I used to wake up in the night and hear them stumble past my house, singing outrageous songs. The worst of it was that we couldn’t keep the scandal to ourselves and the folk at Greenhill began to talk of “sodden Fairfield” and taught their children to sing a song about us:

  “Sodden Fairfield, sodden Fairfield, has no use for

  bread-and-butter,

  Rum for breakfast, rum for dinner, rum for tea, and

  rum for supper!”

  We are easy-going in our village, but we didn’t like that.

  Of course we soon found out where the young fellows went to get the drink, and landlord was terribly cut up that his tenant should have turned out so badly, but his wife wouldn’t hear of parting with the brooch, so that he couldn’t give the Captain notice to quit. But as time went on, things grew from bad to worse, and at all hours of the day you would see those young reprobates sleeping it off on the village green. Nearly every afternoon a ghost-wagon used to jolt down to the ship with a lading of rum, and though the older ghosts seemed inclined to give the Captain’s hospitality the go-by, the youngsters were neither to hold nor to bind.

  So one afternoon when I was taking my nap I heard a knock at the door, and there was parson looking very serious, like a man with a job before him that he didn’t altogether relish. “I’m going down to talk to the Captain about all this drunkenness in the village, and I want you to come with me,” he said straight out.

  I can’t say that I fancied the visit much, myself, and I tried to hint to parson that as, after all, they were only a lot of ghosts it didn’t very much matter.

  “Dead or alive, I’m responsible for the good conduct,” he said, “and I’m going to do my duty and put a stop to this continued disorder. And you are coming with me, John Simmons.” So I went, parson being a persuasive kind of man.

  We went down to the ship, and as we approached her I could see the Captain tasting the air on deck. When he saw parson he took off his hat very politely and I can tell you that I was relieved to find that he had a proper respect for the cloth. Parson acknowledged his salute and spoke out stoutly enough. “Sir, I should be glad to have a word with you.”

  “Come on board, sir; come on board,” said the Captain, and I could tell by his voice that he knew why we were there. Parson and I climbed up an uneasy kind of ladder, and the Captain took us into the great cabin at the back of the ship, where the bay-window was. It was the most wonderful place you ever saw in your life, all full of gold and silver plate, swords with jewelled scabbards, carved oak chairs, and great chests that look as though they were bursting with guineas. Even parson was surprised, and he did not shake his head very hard when the Captain took down some silver cups and poured us out a drink of rum. I tasted mine, and I don’t mind saying that it changed my view of things entirely. There was nothing betwixt and between about that rum, and I felt that it was ridiculous to blame the lads for drinking too much of stuff like that. It seemed to fill my veins with honey and fire.

  Parson put the case squarely to the Captain, but I didn’t listen much to what he said; I was busy sipping my drink and looking through the window at the fishes swimming to and fro over landlord’s turnips. Just then it seemed the most natural thing in the world that they should be there, though afterwards, of course, I could see that that proved it was a ghost-ship.

  But even then I thought it was queer when I saw a drowned sailor float by in the thin air with his hair and beard all full of bubbles. It was the first time I had seen anything quite like that at Fairfield.

  All the time I was regarding the wonders of the deep parson was telling Captain Roberts how there was no peace or rest in the village owing to the curse of drunkenness, and what a bad example the youngsters were setting to the older ghosts. The Captain listened very attentively, and only put in a word now and then about boys being boys and young men sowing their wild oats. But when parson had finished his speech he filled up our silver cups and said to parson, with a flourish, “I should be sorry to cause trouble anywhere where I have been made welcome, and you will be glad to hear that I put to sea tomorrow night. And now you must drink me a prosperous voyage.” So we all stood up and drank the toast with honour, and that noble rum was like hot oil in my veins.

  After that Captain showed us some of the curiosities he had brought back from foreign parts, and we were greatly amazed, though afterwards I couldn’t clearly remember what they were. And then I found myself walking across the turnips with parson, and I was telling him of the glories of the deep that I had seen through the window of the ship. He turned on me severely. “If I were you, John Simmons,” he said, “I should go straight home to bed.” He has a way of putting things that wouldn’t occur to an ordinary man, has parson, and I did as he told me.

  Well, next day it came on to blow, and it blew harder and harder, till about eight o’clock at night I heard a noise and looked out into the garden. I dare say you won’t believe me, it seems a bit tall even to me, but the wind had lifted the thatch of my pigsty into the widow’s garden a second time. I thought I wouldn’t wait to hear what widow had to say about it, so I went across the green to the “Fox and Grapes,” and the wind was so strong that I danced along on tiptoe like a girl at the fair. When I got to the inn landlord had to help me shut the door; it seemed as though a dozen goats were pushing against it to come in out of the storm.

  “It’s a powerful tempest,” he said, drawing the beer. “I hear there’s a chimney down at Dickory End.”

  “It’s a funny thing how these sailors know about the weather,” I answered. “When Captain said he was going tonight, I was thinking it would take a capful of wind to carry the ship back to sea, but now here’s more than a capful.”

  “Ah, yes,” said landlord, “it’s tonight he goes true enough, and, mind you, though he treated me handsome over the rent, I’m not sure it’s a loss to the village. I don’t hold with gentrice who fetch their drink from London instead of helping local traders to get their living.”

  “But you haven’t got any rum like his,” I said, to draw him out.

  His neck grew red above his collar, and I was afraid I’d gone too far; but after a while he got his breath with a grunt.

  “John Simmons,” he said, “if you’ve come down here this windy night to talk a lot of fool’s talk, you’ve wasted a journey.”

  Well, of course, then I had to smooth him down with praising his rum, and Heaven forgive me for swearing it was better than Captain’s. For the like of that rum no living lips have tasted save mine and parson’s. But somehow or other I brought landlord round, and presently we must have a glass of his best to prove its quality.

  “Beat that if you can!” he cried, and we both raised our glasses to our mouths, only to stop half-way and look at each other in amaze. For the wind that had been howling outside like an outrageous dog had all of a sudden turned as melodious as the carol-boys of a Christmas Eve.

  “Surely that’s not my Martha,” whispered landlord; Martha being his great-aunt that lived in the loft overhead.

  We went to the door, and the wind burst it open so that the handle was driven clean into the plaster of the wall. But we didn’t think about that at the time; for over our heads, sailing very comfortably through the windy stars, was the ship that had passed the summer in landlord’s field. Her portholes and her bay-window were blazing with lights, and there was a noise of singing and fiddling on her decks. “He’s gone,” shouted landlord above the storm, “and he’s taken half the village with him!” I could only nod in answer, not having lungs like bellows of leather.

  In the morning we were a
ble to measure the strength of the storm, and over and above my pigsty there was damage enough wrought in the village to keep us busy. True it is that the children had to break down no branches for the firing that autumn, since the wind had strewn the woods with more than they could carry away. Many of our ghosts were scattered abroad, but this time very few came back, all the young men having sailed with Captain; and not only ghosts, for a poor half-witted lad was missing, and we reckoned that he had stowed himself away or perhaps shipped as cabin-boy, not knowing any better.

  What with the lamentations of the ghost-girls and the grumbling of families who had lost an ancestor, the village was upset for a while, and the funny thing was that it was the folk who had complained most of the carryings-on of the youngsters, who made most noise now that they were gone. I hadn’t any sympathy with shoemaker or butcher, who ran about saying how much they missed their lads, but it made me grieve to hear the poor bereaved girls calling their lovers by name on the village green at nightfall. It didn’t seem fair to me that they should have lost their men a second time, after giving up life in order to join them, as like as not. Still, not even a spirit can be sorry for ever, and after a few months we made up our mind that the folk who had sailed in the ship were never coming back, and we didn’t talk about it any more.

  And then one day, I dare say it would be a couple of years after, when the whole business was quite forgotten, who should come trapesing along the road from Portsmouth but the daft lad who had gone away with the ship, without waiting till he was dead to become a ghost. You never saw such a boy as that in all your life. He had a great rusty cutlass hanging to a string at his waist, and he was tattooed all over in fine colours, so that even his face looked like a girl’s sampler. He had a handkerchief in his hand full of foreign shells and old-fashioned pieces of small money, very curious, and he walked up to the well outside his mother’s house and drew himself a drink as if he had been nowhere in particular.

  The worst of it was that he had come back as soft-headed as he went, and try as we might we couldn’t get anything reasonable out of him. He talked a lot of gibberish about keel-hauling and walking the plank and crimson murders—things which a decent sailor should know nothing about, so that it seemed to me that for all his manners Captain had been more of a pirate than a gentleman mariner. But to draw sense out of that boy was as hard as picking cherries off a crab-tree. One silly tale he had that he kept on drifting back to, and to hear him you would have thought that it was the only thing that happened to him in his life. “We was at anchor,” he would say, “off an island called the Basket of Flowers, and the sailors had caught a lot of parrots and we were teaching them to swear. Up and down the decks, up and down the decks, and the language they used was dreadful. Then we looked up and saw the masts of the Spanish ship outside the harbour. Outside the harbour they were, so we threw the parrots into the sea and sailed out to fight. And all the parrots were drownded in the sea and the language they used was dreadful.” That’s the sort of boy he was, nothing but silly talk of parrots when we asked him about the fighting. And we never had a chance of teaching him better, for two days after he ran away again, and hasn’t been seen since.

  That’s my story, and I assure you that things like that are happening at Fairfield all the time. The ship has never come back, but somehow as people grow older they seem to think that one of these windy nights she’ll come sailing in over the hedges with all the lost ghosts on board. Well, when she comes, she’ll be welcome. There’s one ghost-lass that has never grown tired of waiting for her lad to return. Every night you’ll see her out on the green, straining her poor eyes with looking for the mast-lights among the stars. A faithful lass you’d call her, and I’m thinking you’d be right.

  Landlord’s field wasn’t a penny the worse for the visit, but they do say that since then the turnips that have been grown in it have tasted of rum.

  WALTER DE LA MARE

  The Listeners

  Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was an English author of novels and short stories and a poet. He wrote many children’s stories and supernatural fiction for adults and frequently returned to the themes of childhood, wonder, dreams, and death. In 1947 he won the Carnegie Medal in literature for Collected Stories for Children.

  “The Listeners,” de la Mare’s most famous poem, was first published in London in 1912 in The Listeners and Other Poems. It is a work of mystery and ambiguity, with the reader, like the knocker at the door, increasingly desperate to be acknowledged and to understand.

  “Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,

  Knocking on the moonlit door;

  And his horse in the silence champ’d the grasses

  Of the forest’s ferny floor:

  And a bird flew up out of the turret,

  Above the Traveller’s head:

  And he smote upon the door again a second time;

  “Is there anybody there?” he said.

  But no one descended to the Traveller;

  No head from the leaf-fringed sill

  Lean’d over and look’d into his grey eyes,

  Where he stood perplex’d and still.

  But only a host of phantom listeners

  That dwelt in the lone house then

  Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

  To that voice from the world of men:

  Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

  That goes down to the empty hall,

  Hearkening in an air stirr’d and shaken

  By the lonely Traveller’s call.

  And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

  Their stillness answering his cry,

  While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

  ’Neath the starr’d and leafy sky;

  For he suddenly smote on the door, even

  Louder, and lifted his head:—

  “Tell them I came, and no one answer’d,

  That I kept my word,” he said.

  Never the least stir made the listeners,

  Though every word he spake

  Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

  From the one man left awake:

  Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

  And the sound of iron on stone,

  And how the silence surged softly backward,

  When the plunging hoofs were gone.

  KENNETH MORRIS

  Red-Peach-Blossom Inlet

  Kenneth Morris (1879–1937) was a Welsh theosophist and writer of fantasy novels. His work was a noted influence on Ursula K. Le Guin, and she named him one of the three great prose stylists of modern fantasy. His most famous works include The Book of Three Dragons (1930) and The Secret Mountain and Other Tales (1926). He is a neglected author, but a recent collection of his work, gathering together stories written under various pseudonyms from often obscure journals, The Dragon Path: Collected Tales of Kenneth Morris, was published by Tor Books in 1995.

  Morris’s “Red-Peach-Blossom Inlet” was first published under the name Hankin Maggs in The Theosophical Path, Vol. 11, October 1916, and then in 1926 under Kenneth Morris’s own name in The Secret Mountain and Other Tales. It is a story set within Eastern mythologies, and Morris is in general a writer who breaks new ground in his works by experimenting with nontraditional settings for fantasy. His story is a philosophical work that ponders the nature of enlightenment.

  Wang Tao-chen loved the ancients: that was why he was a fisherman. Modernity you might call irremediable; it was best left alone. But far out in the middle lake, when the distances were all a blue haze, and the world a sapphirean vacuity, one might breathe the atmosphere of ancient peace, and give oneself to the pursuit of immortality. By study of the Classics, by rest of the senses, and by cultivating a mood of universal benevolence, Wang Tao-chen proposed to become, first a Superior Man, then a Sennin, an Adept, immortal.

  He had put away the desire for an official career. If, thought he, one could see a way, by
taking office, to reform the administration, the case would be different. One would pass one’s examinations, accept a prefecture, climb the ladder of official promotion, and put one’s learning and character to use. One would establish peace, of course; and presently, perhaps even reweld into one the many kingdoms into which the ancient empire of the Hans had split. But unfortunately, in those days there were but two roads to success: force and fraud. And paradoxically, they always led to failure; for as soon as you had cheated or thumped your way into office, you were marked as the prey of all other cheaters and thumpers; and had but to wait a year or two for the most expert of them to have you out, handed over to the Board of Punishments, and belike shortened of stature by a head. The disadvantages of such a career outweighed its temptations; and Wang Tao-chen had long since decided that it was not for him.

  So he refrained from politics altogether, and transplanted his ambitions into more secret fields. Inactive, he would do well by his age; unstriving, he would attain possession of the Tao. He would be peaceful in a world disposed to violence; honest where all were cheats; serene and unambitious in an age of fussy ambition. Let the spoils of office go to inferior men; for him the blue calmness of the lake, the blue emptiness above: the place that his soul should reflect and rival; the untroubled, noiseless place that reflected heaven. Where, too, one might go through the day unreminded that that unintelligent Li Kuang-ming, one’s neighbor, had already obtained his prefecture, and was making a good thing of it; or that Fan Kao-sheng, the flashy and ostentatious, had won his chin shih degree, and was spoken well of by the undiscerning on all sides. Let him examine either of them in the Classics....

  Certainly there was no better occupation for the meditative than fishing. One suffered no interruption—except when the fish bit. He tolerated this for a year or two; and brought a good catch home to his wife of an evening, until such time as he had shaken off—as it seemed to him—earthly ambitions and desires. Then, when he could hear of Li’s and Fan’s successes with equanimity, and his own mind had grown one-pointed towards wisdom, he turned from books to pure contemplation, and became impatient even of the attentions of the fish. He would emulate the sages of old; in this respect it was a very simple matter. One had but to bend one’s hook straight before casting it, and every finned and scaled creature in Lake Tao-ting might wait its turn to nibble, yet shake down none of the fruits of serenity from his mind. It worked excellently.