Antique Dust Read online

  Antique Dust

  Ghost Stories

  by ROBERT WESTALL

  with a new introduction

  by ORRIN GREY

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Antique Dust by Robert Westall

  First published London: Viking, 1989

  First Valancourt Books edition 2015

  Copyright © Robert Westall, 1989

  Introduction copyright © Orrin Grey, 2015

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Cover by M. S. Corley

  INTRODUCTION

  ‘It was the infinite strangeness of the supernatural that fascinated Robert Westall, not the horror.’ Those words – from the jacket flap of the 1993 edition of the Westall greatest hits compilation Demons and Shadows: The Ghostly Best Stories of Robert Westall – are probably what first drew me to Robert Westall’s work, and that quality of his work is certainly a large part of what made me keep reading.

  Robert Westall (1929-1993) was best known as a writer of books for children and young adults, often involving cats and themes surrounding his experiences growing up during World War II. He was twice honored with the Carnegie Medal, the foremost British award for children’s literature. He was only the second author ever to win the medal twice, and no one has ever won a third. Renowned Japanese animator and director Hayao Miyazaki is a fan of Westall and partially adapted his story ‘Blackham’s Wimpy’ as the manga A Trip to Tynemouth.

  Westall’s most famous work is probably The Machine Gunners – for which he won the Carnegie Medal in 1975 – but he also produced a substantial body of ‘ghostly’ tales and novels throughout his life, starting with his third novel The Watch House in 1977. As an aficionado and practitioner of the supernatural story myself, it was Westall’s forays into the realm of the spectral that first caught my attention, and he remains, to my mind, one of the best and most undersung practitioners of the genre, and an obvious successor to that godfather of the English ghost story, M.R. James.

  Like James – to whom the book you’re holding is dedicated – Westall is a master of what James referred to as ‘a pleasing terror’. Those cold fingers up the spine, that creeping flesh which James says is the goal of ‘all writers of ghost stories’. The horror of the supernatural may not have been what fascinated Westall, but he possessed no shortage of aptitude for it. And like James, Westall’s spooks are rarely as simple as what H.P. Lovecraft once dismissed as ‘a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule’. The ghosts that populate Westall’s stories are more than merely the restless spirit of someone with unfinished business; they are the remnants of old angers and hatreds and lusts and hungers, often given an altogether too tangible form.

  And yet, Westall also offers us something else, something that is often missing from tales of this sort: humanism. Accord­ing to that same jacket flap from Demons and Shadows, Westall said that ‘there’s a freedom in ghostliness. You break the boring surface of life and let the underside out’. Strangely enough, it’s that ‘boring surface’, as much as any spectral hap­pening, that makes Westall’s supernatural tales work so well. By establishing a world that feels utterly genuine, often in­clud­ing places and things drawn from Westall’s own life, pop­ulated by characters who are immediate and real, he makes the inevitable supernatural breach of that ‘boring surface’ all the more affecting.

  In a Robert Westall story, the haunting is never given short shrift, but it also never completely overpowers the human elements, even when those humans come to bad ends. After all, as Westall himself said in The Watch House, ‘Human beings are spooks plus. Why shouldn’t they sometimes win?’

  Though he is credited with more than 40 books of fiction, the volume that you hold in your hands was the only one that was marketed to adults. First published in 1989, Antique Dust takes the antiquarian protagonists of M.R. James one step further by making Geoff Ashden, its narrator and sometime protagonist, an antique dealer himself, no doubt inspired by Westall’s own dabbling in the trade.

  An antique dealer proves to be the ideal lens through which to view this septet of ghostly tales. As Ashden says in ‘The Last Day of Miss Dorinda Molyneaux’, possibly the best – and certainly the most Jamesian – of the stories in this collection, ‘Dealers are undertakers of a sort. When a man dies the undertaker comes for the body and the dealer comes for the rest.’ In most of the stories in Antique Dust it is some part of that ‘rest’ that triggers and serves as a locus for the spectral goings-on, whether a fiendish clock in ‘The Ghost and Clocky Watson’ or a pair of antique glasses in ‘The Woolworth Spectacles’. Ashden sums it up by saying, ‘I have known more evil in a set of false teeth than in any so-called haunted house in England.’ (Which is not to say that there aren’t haunted locales here, including a truly ominous abode in the form of the titular structure from the chilling final story, ‘The Ugly House’.)

  All the stories in Antique Dust – even its lone non-­supernatural tale ‘The Dumbledore’ – share a sense of the past, not as something departed, but as an immediate and inescapable part of life, one that continues to be felt down intervening years and even centuries. (Not surprising, in a series of stories centered around the antiques trade.) They also share Westall’s fascination with the ‘infinite strangeness of the supernatural’, and his sure grasp on the humanity of his characters. And while the tales in this book are likely to give you a few uneasy nights, it’ll be that ‘infinite strangeness’ and the deeply human heart of the stories that stick with you long after you’ve finished reading, not the horror.

  Orrin Grey

  January 2015

  Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, amateur film scholar, and monster expert who was born on the night before Halloween. He shares Westall’s fascination with the ‘infinite strangeness of the supernatural’, and is the author of two collections of strange stories, Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, and Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, due out soon from Word Horde. Visit him online at orringrey.com.

  To M. R. James,

  most economical of writers,

  who could coax horror

  out of a ragged blanket

  The Devil and Clocky Watson

  I doubt you’ll remember Clocky Watson. Little, with a ginger moustache. Used to hang around the antique-sales after the War. I doubt I’d remember him myself, though many a bad turn we did each other. Except for the way he died. And the story he told me before he died.

  I remember the first sale he came to, at Chelford village hall. Those were the days! Rows of varnished, bulbous-legged tables and over-stuffed sofas with bidders perched on every arm, eating sandwiches cut by the village wives, massive in navy floral prints. Auctioneers had time to be witty in those days. I remember young Taberner: ‘Nice pair of marble lions. Stick them on your gatepost to sneer at passing strangers! Who’ll start me at two pounds?’

  Thin as a rail he was, then. Who’d have thought he’d die of a heart attack at eighteen stone?

  Anyway, there was Clocky, in his green pork-pie hat and demob suit, already wearing thin. I noticed him because of the way he looked at things. Pure avarice! By the time he’d picked something up and turned it over and over in his little pale hands with the ginger hairs on the back, you’d have thought it was his already. Mind you, he wasn’t such a fool as to let you know what
he was bidding for; he handled everything.

  But mostly he handled clocks, Viennese wall-clocks. A glut on the market in those days, with their big glass cases and eagles on top, and brass pendulums swinging. Every old lady who died seemed to have at least three. They hung in rows, on the darkest wall of any saleroom. Three quid, they’d fetch, if all the decorative knobs were intact, and they were working. If some knobs were missing, the price was halved; and if they wouldn’t tick when you opened the case and swung the pendulum, they weren’t worth five bob. It can cost the earth to get a dead clock repaired, and your profit’s gone.

  So there were we dealers, going along the row, twiddling and opening and swinging the pendulums, one after another.

  I’d never known a worse lot. Couldn’t get a tick out of them, and every second knob missing. I didn’t bother to bid. Neither did anybody else, except Clocky. He got twelve in succession, at five bob each. By the end, people were starting to laugh. But Clocky just dipped his head, with that sly little grin of his.

  I was behind him in the queue to pay the auctioneer’s clerk. He interested me, because he didn’t look like an idiot. I can tell you, he was hard-up. He started paying in dirty pound notes, but had to finish with pennies.

  But he had fivepence left, enough for a sandwich. I hadn’t seen him eat anything all day.

  I was next in line; had my cheque ready. So I caught up with him in the kitchen, where the village women were clearing up. Two and a half Spam sandwiches left, and two rounds of cheese.

  ‘Sixpence the lot,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t want to take them home; me husband’s sick of them.’

  Clocky was never one to miss a bargain; but it nearly finished him. He started to turn out all his pockets for the last penny, and pulled out a dirty handkerchief by mistake. With it came a shower of varnished wooden knobs. From Viennese clocks . . .

  I made him turn all his pockets out; I was twice his size, and not to be trifled with. In his inside pockets there were three gilded eagles. I dragged him back to the clocks themselves, and felt inside the works, and each had a little bit of paper stuffed between the cogs, to stop it working.

  Oh, he’d been busy, had Clocky; little fingers busy in the dark. Thirty quid’s worth of clocks reduced to rubbish. I dragged him along to the auctioneer. But Clocky said he’d taken the knobs and eagles off after he’d bought the clocks, to keep them safe from thieves. And of course he knew nothing about the bits of paper. And young Taberner was too busy counting the cheques for the big stuff, like Sheraton tables. And everyone else was too busy carrying stuff out to their vans. Even the village copper wasn’t interested; too busy waving a bundle of brass stair-rods he’d got for two bob.

  Clocky turned to me, very pale and eyes blazing. He was eating his sandwiches like a ravening wolf, now he was off the hook.

  ‘I’ll remember you. Nearly did for me at my first sale. By my last, I’ll have eaten you.’ As I said, I was a big feller then, but I shivered. He was like a starving dog you try to take a bone off. Clocky was hungry; for a lot more than sandwiches.

  As I drove out, I passed him wheeling his clocks home in an old pram, like a tramp.

  He took up with Joe Gorman after that. Joe and his shop were famous throughout Cheshire. He’d been a big dealer in his day; and a crafty sod. But he was eighty-three by then, and he’d given up. He had a lot of good stuff left; but buried in the middle of great heaps of rubbish, piled up to the low ceilings. Nobody knew what he had, and he wouldn’t let anybody sort it. You’d see the gilt leg of a Louis XIV chair, glinting out through a huddle of old black bicycles. I used to drop in to see Joe regularly; let him go on about the way he put things over people fifty years ago, and keep on giving that gilt leg a friendly tug while he wasn’t looking. It took me three months to work that chair out to the surface; then I pretended to notice it for the first time, gave a heave and out it came.

  ‘Not bad, Joe. How much?’

  ‘You clumsy bugger, you’ve broken t’back of it.’

  I looked; the broken ends were filthy; they’d been broken years before.

  I showed him before he got his lawyer on to me. He cackled with glee; he’d known it was broken all the time.

  ‘Eeh, a reet battle you had getting that out, lad. I been watchin’ yer . . .’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Not for sale. Purrit back.’

  It was no good arguing; that only made him more stubborn. It nearly broke my heart. I wanted that chair, for my own place. And in another three months it wouldn’t be worth having. Rain dripping down from the sagging, black-cobwebbed ceiling was lifting the gilding off the back.

  ‘Well, be seeing you, Joe.’

  ‘Wait,’ he said, lifting a hand knobbled with arthritis. ‘Ye’ve been good company. Ye can have it for a quid.’ I paid him. He folded the note small and tucked it into a pocket of his greasy waistcoat.

  ‘I’ll not be seeing you around then? Now you’ve got your chair?’

  I looked at him; old cloth cap; the Sheraton armchair he always sat in, making the striped brocade blacker and blacker with the years. The tabby cat on his knee, moth-eaten and purring; its brown congealed saucer of milk, that never seemed to be changed, under the chair. The glass oil-lamp without a shade, that was his only source of light because he said he wasn’t keeping the electric board in his old age. I thought what it must be like to be old, when once you’d been young and quick and as sharp as a needle . . .

  Us dealers had a bet on about Joe. Whether he or his shop would collapse first; or whether they’d go together. The damp thatch sagged; the whole house leaned with salt-subsidence, only held up by the massive central chimney. Nobody had dared go upstairs for years. People reckoned one day there’d be a rumble; then there’d be only a pile of smashed furniture, worm-eaten beams and damp thatch. And when they dug down, Joe and his cat would still be sitting there, stone dead.

  ‘I’ll come again, Joe. That table-leg looks interesting.’

  He cackled. ‘That’s a beaut, boy. Chippendale. Got it at the Franley Hall sale, after old Franley shot hisself in 1926.’

  He was joking. Or was he?

  I never did find out, because Clocky Watson discovered him. Any time you went there, you’d find Clocky already sitting, listening to the old man telling of his ancient triumphs. After a bit, Clocky would bring one of his wretched clocks down to clean, while Joe talked. Pretty soon, Joe let him clear a bit of space by the window, for a workshop; Joe would sit and brew tea, and tell Clocky he was restoring the clock all wrong. Clocky had an old blue van by that time. He was making a living running van-loads of restored clocks down to tourist towns like Stratford and Cambridge, where the first American tourists were arriving to be fleeced. He ran a stall in Cambridge market from the back of his van, which had ‘Clocky Watson’ painted on the side, and very bad paintings of Louis XV clocks which he’d never seen outside the Lady Lever Art Gallery. I heard he drove the Cambridge dealers wild; which made him a bit of a folk-hero locally, as we couldn’t stand the southern dealers with their big Mercedes and camel-hair coats and wads of notes.

  A bit of folk-hero, that is, till the night Joe’s shop collapsed. People heard the rumble and came running. All that was left was the central chimney sticking out, and a pile of smashed timber, already alight because Joe always left his paraffin-lamp burning all night, to discourage burglars.

  The fire-brigade could do nothing with it, damp though it must have been. By the morning, all that was left was ashes.

  Halfway through the blaze, somebody said, ‘Joe’s not still in there, is he?’ And we had an awful vision, and all went belting off to Barnton, where he sometimes slept at his sister’s.

  He was there all right. Dead. Someone had got there before us, and told him, and he’d died of a heart attack. Somebody said afterwards how right and poetic it was, the old boy and his shop ending on the same night, after all.

  I didn’t think so; because I had made a few inquiries.

  The w
oman who kept the shop opposite said she’d heard two quick sharp bangs, before the rumble that brought Joe’s shop down. And Clocky Watson’s van had been parked round the back all day, which the woman thought funny, as it was a Sunday and the shop was shut.

  And we all knew Clocky had had a commission in the Royal Engineers, and frequently boasted in the pub of the bridges he’d blown up in Burma . . .

  Clocky and the blue van disappeared for a week. Then he turned up with a van-load of Welsh dressers, spindle-backed rockers and Wedgwood, that he boasted he’d tricked Welsh farmers out of for a song. That van-load was the basis of his real prosperity, and he never looked back.

  I didn’t doubt it about the Welsh farmers; there were rich pickings in Wales in those days.

  But what had the blue van carried away from the shop, on the day before the fire? Nobody would ever know for sure. But I guessed the Chippendale table from Franley Hall, at least.

  Trouble is, if you make inquiries about somebody, people tell them they’re being inquired after. Clocky caught me in the backyard of the pub one night.

  ‘After me again, Ashden?’ He was very cool, lighting up one of those little cigars he began smoking about that time.

  ‘You killed old Joe, when you wrecked his shop . . . murder . . .’

  ‘Prove it.’

  I had nothing to say.

  ‘Ashes to ashes, boyo. Dust to dust.’

  The next thing he did was to buy the Allington house; a huge semi-detached villa, in the Gothic style. Alderman Allington had been the big nob in our town for sixty years, driving out in his black Rolls with the brass headlamps and chauffeur in livery. He never missed a Council meeting, right to the end. So hardly anybody grasped that his childless wife had died, his money departed, his servants gone. From the outside, it was still the grand Allington house.

  He’d been dead a fortnight when they missed him; it was August and most people were away. There sat Alderman Allington, dressed for dinner, or a full meeting of the Council, with thick grey cobwebs dangling from the chandelier, and draping the knives and forks of the silver dinner-service. And all he had in front of him was bread and cheese.