Thomas - Vale of the White Horse and Other Strange British Tales

Vale of the White Horse and Other Strange British Tales

by Scott Thomas

Ebook Edition

Text 2021 by Scott Thomas

Cover and interior art 2021 by Erin Wells

Editor & Publisher, Joe Morey

Copy editing by F. J. Bergman

Ebook Design by Curtis M. Lawson

Weird House Press

Central Point, OR 97502

weirdhousepress.com

Publication History

From Cobwebs and Whispers (Delirium Books, 2001)

Cobwebs

The Cathedral at Humberfield

Dearg-due

Strange Things About Birds (also published in The Years Best Fantasy and Hor-ror 15, St. Martins Press, 2002)

Little Mercy

Crow Apples

The Thorn Dance

Dream of Dead Eyes

The Apple Track

Vale of the White Horse

The Wreck at Wickhampton

Touched with Broken Clouds

A Fine Death for Huber Hillaby

Ellette

From The Garden of Ghosts (Dark Regions Press, 2008)

The Holly and the Keys

Rush-Bearing

Hedgerows

Flower-Mending

Mr. Pickergills Unusual Oak-Wood Box

The Haunted Tobacco

In the Long, Weed-Haunted Summer

The Queen of Weeds

Whispers in the Orchard

From Over the Darkening Fields (Dark Regions Press, 2007)

A Mishap and Its Aftermath

Julias Fancy

The Nyssa

From Shadows of Flesh (Delirium Books, 2004)

The Terrible Woman

Her Fine Mouth

From Sick: An Anthology of Illness (Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2003)

Battle Fever

From Songs from Dead Singers And Other Eulogies (Catalyst Press, 2002)

The Restless Quill

Dedication

For Sara

Introduction

I cant tell you with certainty just when my fascination with the British Isles began, meaning that there was not a singular event, so far as I recall, that launched my mind across the sprawling Atlantic. My mother was an Anglophile in a very big way, and her mother formed a link in that chain as well. So it seems inevitable and natural that I would carry on the tradition. The interest goes back to my childhood. That much is certain.

Some major particulars come to mind, things that spoke to me and influenced me (and continue to do so now). Dickens made a tremendous impact. The movie musical Oliver!, based on the novel Oliver Twist, came out in 1968 when I was nine. My brother Jeffrey and I were obsessed with it to the point where we wore handkerchiefs about our necks to look like little Cockney pickpockets. I remember going out on Halloween as the Artful Dodger, wearing a magnificent top hat that my father skillfully conjured with cardboard and black spray paint.

Then of course there was A Christmas Carol. We grew up with it as a holiday tradition, watching various movie and cartoon versions, from the 1962 animated Mister Magoos Christmas Carol to the rather ridiculous American film version starring Reginald Owen. My favorite, to this day, has always been the black-and-white 1951 treatment starring Alastair Sim, known as Scrooge (predating the delightful musical of that name) in England and released as A Christmas Carol in the United States. I have a boyhood memory of reading from the book, lying on our couch on a snowy afternoon, though it was years before I would read the entire story.

Another classic British ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, written by an American, Henry James, made a powerful impression on the young Thomas brothers. We loved the beautifully spooky black-and-white film version from 1961, The Innocents, directed by Jack Clayton. Its among my favorite movies to this day. I read the actual story itself when I was in my twenties.

Speaking of my twentiesI was rather obsessed with megalithic sites, places like Stonehenge and Avebury, the many mysterious circles of menhirs and great mounded burial tombs that can be found across the British Isles. Youll encounter such places in some of the stories in this collection. I own quite a few volumes on the subject and back then determinedly absorbed books about British prehistory. I also had a fascination with the ancient Celts.

During the time that I was writing my collection Westermead in the early 90s, I was introduced to a wealth of English and Celtic traditional music, listening to brilliant folks like Scotlands Robin Williamson, who has had a powerful effect on me as a writer. The music was rich with history and myth, though I had long been intrigued by the folklore of Britain, from ghosts to black dogs, from banshees to the pagan Green Man.

In October of 1990 I bought my first book of tales by M.R. James. Hes been my favorite supernatural fiction author ever since, and my story The Cathedral at Humberfield in this collection is an ode to him. Hes had quite an influence on me, though Im also very fond of other British authors of the unearthly, folks like H. Russell Wakefield and even Thomas Hardy who incorporated the preternatural to some extent. I could list other masters of the art as well, though I must mention the Welshman Dylan Thomas. Several of his stories have ghosts in them, but regardless of that his brilliance has had a shaping effect on my writing since I found him during my thirties.

The most recent of my fixations, so far as things British go, had everything to do with the English navy and wooden warships in the Age of Sail. I mean, how many people do you know who have actually read a book about the Battle of Trafalgar? That passion was expressed thoroughly in my novel Fellengrey,which takes place in and around something of an alternate England.

Here in these pages you will find a gathering of my tales, set in England, that have been previously published. Almost half of the stories, all of which take place in the past, were published by Delirium Books in my first collection, Cobwebs and Whispers, back in June of 2001. Only 250 copies were produced. I wanted to make these works available to more readers, and to my delight, my dear friend and publisher, Joe Morey, proved eager to make that happen.

Im not going to take up space here speculating as to why I am so drawn to things British, to the places, the mood, the culture, the history, the people or multiplicious particulars. The isles just resonate with me, beyond simple DNA. Its a Anglophile thing. While writing this introduction, for example, I have been sipping English breakfast tea and listening to music by the remarkable English lutenist/composer John Dowland. Perfect!

I hope that these tales, set in crumbling graveyards, in gray London and on misty moors, in hoary manors and circles of weathered stones, will convey some of the mysterious charm and haunted beauty that has long held me kindred with those isles across the sea.

Cheers!

Scott Thomas

Rhode Island, June 24, 2021

Illustration

Vale of the White Horse

W hen he was ten, Alfred Tymms was introduced to the Cerne Giant. The wedding of his aunt Sophie had summoned family from a number of surrounding counties to converge upon the charming village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset. Close by, on a wide May-green hill, was the figure of the Rude Man, as the giant chalk figure was also known. This particular encounter would prove to ignite an interest in the boy which would remain and expand as the years trod forward, a fascination with Britain's colossal white oddities.

Secreted just beneath the grassy flesh of the downlands lies a layer of chalk, easily revealed by penetrating the turf. For reasons archaic, the ancient inhabitants cut strange figures into hillsides, immense mysterious shapes upon which much archaeological conjecture had been spent and around which folk customs still abounded.