Written in Darkness Read online

  Written in Darkness

  Written in Darkness

  by Mark Samuels

  Chômu Press

  Written in Darkness

  by Mark Samuels

  Published by Chômu Press, MMXVII

  Written in Darkness copyright © Mark Samuels 2014

  The right of Mark Samuels to be identified as Author of this

  Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

  Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Published in May 2017 by Chômu Press.

  by arrangement with the author.

  All rights reserved by the author.

  First Kindle Edition

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Design and layout by: David Rix and Chômu Press

  Cover artwork by Chris Conn Askew

  E-mail: [email protected]

  Internet: chomupress.com

  To Daniel Corrick and Quentin S. Crisp

  Contents

  Introduction by Reggie Oliver

  A Call to Greatness

  The Other Tenant

  An Hourglass of the Soul

  The Ruins of Reality

  Alistair

  My World Has No Memories

  Outside Interference

  My Heretical Existence

  In Eternity—Two Lines Intersect

  Publishing History

  Written in Darkness by Mark Samuels, an introduction

  When you come out of an exhibition by a great artist such as Van Gogh, or Rembrandt or Turner, you seem for a while to be seeing the world through their eyes. Colours are unexpectedly vibrant; the faces of passers-by are imbued with a strange profundity. It is the same with some books. All writers worthy of the name present you with a world, or rather a vision of one, that lingers in the mind. The power of that vision is not dependent on whether you find it sympathetic, but on the imaginative skill of the artist and the depth of their intellect. Many successful authors avoid such idiosyncrasy and rely on comforting cliché and received opinion. They have their day and are forgotten, but the ones who last are those who see things as no one before or since has done. Mark Samuels is one of these.

  Yes, you can detect echoes of Lovecraft and Ramsey Campbell, though not, happily, their peculiar way with an English sentence. A fellow feeling with Thomas Ligotti is present, but this is a case of coincidental sympathy rather than imitation. Borges, Machen, Beckett and Kafka might have been grandparents or great uncles, of the kind who give rich presents but are only occasionally seen. Samuels is decidedly himself, an uncompromising metaphysician with a mystical bent. It has surprised some people, though not me, to find that he is a man of religious faith. There is not a whisper of proselytism or facile pietism in his writing, but there is that capacity to stare without self-pity or recoiling into the abyss. It is a faculty that is characteristic of masters of the via negativa such as St John of the Cross. He tells what he sees, not what he (or we) would like to see.

  I first came across Mark Samuels’ work when I read and reviewed his first collection of stories The White Hands (Tartarus 2003). The vision, the characteristic themes, the piercing intellectual insight, the pessimism tempered by a profound humanity were all there. Only the prose lacked the refinement it has since acquired. Subsequently he has steadily produced a coherent and excellent body of work that includes a short novel, The Face of Twilight, and several collections including, up till this point, his finest work, The Man Who Collected Machen.

  This present volume, Written in Darkness, represents the quintessential statement of Samuelsism. “I believe that mental isolation is the essence of weird fiction,” he wrote in The White Hands, and the isolation of the individual in society is still a major preoccupation, coupled with a singularly vivid understanding of the elusiveness of human identity. This last notion is at the roots of some of the greatest “horror” fiction of the past—see Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde etc.—but it is being tackled today, not least by Mark Samuels, with equal if not greater imaginative insight. Perhaps it is because in the so-called “global” world we are losing our old sense of national and familial identity. The identities we are adopting are impersonal and bewildering to us. We are becoming what we do not want to become.

  That is a theme in some of Samuels’ most arresting tales. In “My World Has No Memories” a man finds himself at sea, isolated, and beginning to undergo a frightful sea-change. In “The Other Tenant” Samuels revisits one of his most successful early stories, “Apartment 205”, about a man unwillingly drawn to the hideous “life” of a flat adjacent to him, but it is far from being a mere repetition of the earlier tale. The eponymous hero of “Alistair” is discovering his own sinister identity. “A Call to Greatness” is a kind of Heart of Darkness set in the frozen wastes of Siberia and also involves a possible transference of identity, all the more fearful for being so ambiguous.

  These transformations often relate to the workplace—an area at once alienating and anxious to draw you into its steely bosom. In “An Hourglass of the Soul” and “Outside Interference”, employees of large, faceless corporations find themselves forced into new and terrible existences through their work. The worst is that, in the end, they seem to accept their fate. Perhaps even to a greater extent than Thomas Ligotti, Samuels is the poet and prophet of modern technological dehumanisation.

  It would be wrong, though, to assume that these interlocking themes are treated monotonously. On the contrary, each of these stories generates its own unique atmosphere of grim beauty: foreign cities, Siberian wastes, tumultuous seas, desert places and the environs of Hampstead and Highgate in North London are some of the settings. The latter’s haunting atmospheres have been an inspiration to many fine works of fiction, notably nearly all the later novels of the writer Stella Gibbons, and Samuels is now added to their number.

  I do not find Samuels’ work in any sense lowering. The intense horror of his stories has the exhilaration of a warning rather than the unmitigated gloom of a prediction. Without ever explicitly saying so, Samuels reminds us of the precious importance of human individuality and relationships, of, in short, the human soul. In his humanity he rages against inhumanity. That is why Samuels is one of the most significant and exciting voices in modern horror.

  Mark is an artist. His work has a passionate intensity and integrity. His vision can be bleak, but it is realised with a kind of grandeur that makes it inspiring. You emerge from it, as you emerge from Dante’s Inferno, purged by pity and terror, and strangely uplifted.

  REGGIE OLIVER, August 2014

  A Call to Greatness

  “We have most of us known some Masters of the Higher Wisdom, some pilgrims upon the path to power, some eastern esoteric saints and seers, who had really nothing to do with ethics. Something different, something detached and irresponsible, tinges the moral atmosphere . . . of the genuine and ancient cults of Asia. Deeper than the depths of metaphysics, far down in the abysses of mystical meditations, under all that solemn universe of spiritual things, is a secret, an intangible and terrible levity. It does not really very much matter what one does.”

  G.K. Chesterton

  “10. In the course of the struggle against the criminals who have destroyed and profaned Russia, it must be remembered that, on account of the complete depravation of morals and the absolute licentiousness, intellectual and physical, which now prevail in Russia, it is not possible to retain our old standard of values. ‘Truth and mercy’ are no longer admissible. Henceforth, there can only be ‘Truth and merciless hardness’. The evil w
hich has fallen upon the land, with the object of destroying the divine principle in the human soul, must be extirpated root and branch. Fury against the heads of the revolution, and its devoted followers, must know no boundaries.”

  From Order No. 15, Baron Maximilian.

  The man had finished the bottle of Bordeaux and gazed at the stained bottom of his glass. Half a dozen cigarettes had dulled his palate. The taste was bitter on his tongue and his mouth was dry. He was alone at the table outside a little café high up in the winding streets around Montmartre, beneath the white domes of Sacré-Cœur. Scattered across the check tablecloth in front of him were a series of age-yellowed papers. The empty bottle and the full ashtray secured the items against the light evening breeze that occasionally caused their edges to rustle.

  He called out for the garçon, who brought another bottle and, noting the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, provided a light. The garçon cupped his hand around the flame from a match. He left the little box containing the other matches on the table, removed the cork from the fresh bottle, poured it out into a fresh glass and then silently retreated back into the deserted café.

  The man was sick of his job in the European Chamber of Commerce, despite the wealth he had accumulated. He felt himself to be a good European but had become disillusioned with the occupational venality that had come to infect his soul. He had a fine apartment in Paris, a townhouse in Marseille and owned two properties in Germany that housed his mother and his cousin, and, moreover, his portfolio boasted many lucrative returns on his investments. He wanted for nothing materially.

  The late afternoon shadows were lengthening and it felt more like autumn than spring. No blossom yet raged in a riot of colour on the barren trees and the chill in the air took a firmer hold as the sun dipped behind the rooftops.

  The European dream was dead, he thought, the Europe of grand ideals was buried in the ashes of apathy. There was no brotherhood of nations, only the squalid struggle of the political and financial masters to line their own pockets, while the masses were brainwashed into a zombie-like existence under the false flag of liberty. All its values were secular and materialistic—with propagandistic jargon employed to nullify citizens from detecting the corrosion of their souls. Once Europe had professed itself to be the embodiment of a spiritual ideal. But, like a fossil, all that remained of it now was its hollow shell, the insides having rotted away during the passage of centuries.

  A shudder ran through the frame of the man, whose name was Hilaire Egremont, as he continued contemplating the items on the table, which he had been doing for the last hour and a half. He was in his thirties, of above medium height, slim and with a fine head of jet-black hair. His wealth displayed itself in his beautifully manicured fingernails, highly polished black shoes and his expensive Italian suit. The end of a silk handkerchief of vivid yellow matched the tie knotted around his shirt collar. He was, in appearance, every inch a self-assured Parisian.

  Distracted by the papers laid out before him, Egremont did not notice as a pale-faced man clad in an army greatcoat with the collar turned up suddenly emerged from the late afternoon shadows and approached his table. Egremont did not even look up when the stranger, silent as a bird of prey, slipped into the seat opposite him. It was only when the person produced a single cough by way of drawing attention to his presence that Egremont’s reveries were broken.

  “You have received my parcel I see,” said the stranger. There was something uncomfortably intense about his eyes. They were a pale shade of blue and were set beneath a lofty forehead. In their expression there seemed to lurk the potential for violence.

  “Ah, you have gone to a great deal of trouble,” Egremont replied, “but I am at a loss as to why you requested this meeting.”

  “Are you not interested in destiny?”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is not important.”

  Egremont ground his finished cigarette into the ashtray.

  “Look around you,” the stranger said. “Can’t you see that we are living amongst the ruins of our civilisation?”

  The words seemed to chime in with the deliberations already in Egremont’s mind, and he thought again of the disillusionment he felt over his own time spent in the corridors of power in the European Union. What good had come out of the project? A series of once great cities Americanised out of all recognition, streets thronged with homogenised consumerist outlets, a gulf between cultural and historical identity, blatant social engineering, obscenely wealthy masters of state and private enterprises, a celebrity-obsessed media, intellectual debates reduced to sound bites, a collective attention span that diminished year on year, aged people with plastic faces worshipping youth and an intelligentsia committed only to the self-destructive cause of fashionable cynicism.

  “One man foresaw this would come to pass,” the stranger said.

  He jabbed a finger down on one of the series of documents upon the table.

  “A contemporary account from 1921,” he said. “It will suffice.”

  Egremont’s gaze fixed on the papers in question. They read as follows . . .

  *

  Entries from the “Confessions of a Reporter in Eurasia” 1921.

  We had been travelling for days on two reindeers and, at the last, my guide refused to take me any closer to my destination. He baulked at the roubles I offered him, and merely laughed uproariously when my other hand drew out an ice-cold pistol from the pocket of my greatcoat. He pointed over towards the other side of the ridge directly ahead of us and said that a further two-hour trek would bring me to the nobleman I sought. For his part, he dreaded the Baron more than he loved money or feared death. Saying no more, he turned his mount around and headed back the way we had come, into the murk of the deepening twilight. I watched him go, his form disappearing into the shadows creeping across the Russian steppe as the clouds passed in front of the moon.

  For the first time in hours I had begun to take in my surroundings, having been, until then, subject to travel weariness and the copious amounts of neat vodka I’d consumed to ward off the effects of the thin sub-zero air on my city-coddled frame. Stark black trees jutted out of the snow like vertical cracks. What patches of earth were laid bare were also frozen solid. Scattered clumps of sharp rock pushed up from the surface terrain. The wind was ceaseless and bitter. It tore at everything in its course. Serpentine paths coiled around desolate mountainsides and dead valleys in perilous confusion. Sometimes they dropped away into chasms or vanished altogether in a titanic heap of fallen snow from the slopes above them.

  It was an apposite landscape in which to encounter, finally, the man I had tracked for months and with whom my newspaper had demanded I secure an interview—a deadly landscape for one of the most deadly of men.

  Yes, I too was afraid, but, unlike my nomad guide, I had no choice but to go on, despite tales of the Baron’s fanaticism. My editor had made it very clear to me in the last telegram I had received that if I did not get the story they required I could rot in Russia for all they cared. My money was almost exhausted, and further funds would only be wired to me once I had delivered my copy. The Baron had become a cause célèbre back home. The public were clamouring for news of him, their stupid appetite for sensation having been roused to fever pitch by rumours filtering over to Britain from this hellish region on the far side of the globe. The Baron was the hammer of the Bolsheviks, the merciless slayer of the Reds, a ruthless demigod with reputed supernatural powers. And he did not take kindly to outsiders showing an interest in his affairs.

  After having fought in the Russian Civil War on the side of the White Army, he had found himself master of Mongolia, lauded by the Bogd Khan, spiritual ruler of that country. His cavalry army was drawn from Russia, from Mongolia and from Tibet. His beliefs were a recondite mixture of Russian Orthodoxy, of the divine rights of kings and of esoteric Buddhism. He saw the communists as the greatest evil that has arisen to enslave mankind, since they sought the destructio
n of all spiritual truths. They were the agents of Anti-Christ. The West was finished, so he thought. Corrupted by materialism and bureaucracy, it had abandoned heroic idealism and allowed itself to sink into a morass of urbanised (and hence artificial) values that alienated it from the true realities of Nature. It was from the East that salvation would arise, from wilderness lands that had not yet disconnected themselves from the wellspring of primordial and cosmic spiritual truth by descending into degenerate materialism. He saw himself as the fulfilment of the Kali Yuga—the Dark Age—who would finally destroy the West, and out of its ruins bring about the dawn of a new golden age.

  I pressed onwards, occasionally jabbing my boots into the side of the reindeer to encourage it to stay the course. It was, like myself, close to exhaustion, and had once or twice previously tried to throw me when I had drunkenly grasped at its antlers for additional support. I believe we were both equally sick of one another’s unwashed stench and surly presence.

  The snow began to fall again just as we began a slow climb up a trail winding along the side of a cliff-like ridge. By the time we were halfway up, with no possibility of retreat, it became a blizzard. The swirling wind dashed flakes into my exposed face, crusting my beard with ice, half-coating my eyes and forcing me to squint. I was enveloped in a world of white-out, lost in an infinite blank page without beginning or end. Perhaps my newspaper story would never be written and I would perish here, alone and forgotten—save for a campfire anecdote about a stupid foreigner spun by my nomad guide for the amusement of his Tsaatan tribe.