Robert Aickman

Scary stories for Halloween: The Hospice by Robert Aickman

The plainness of this story's setting is not so much a background for horror as its very source

Xan Brooks

Monday 29 October 2012

Robert Aickman, like many of the finest British horror writers, was a respectable Jekyll who indulged his Hyde on the side. By day he was co-founder of the Inland Waterways Association and chairman of the London opera society. By night he penned a series of self-styled "strange stories" about haunted houses, mysterious visitors and antique dolls that come alive when the door is closed. The Hospice, written six years before the author's death in 1981, is one of the best.

I first ran across The Hospice in an anthology called Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Marvin Kaye, who explains in the foreword that he initially hesitated before including the tale, because he couldn't quite tease out its meaning. Having now read the thing at least six or seven times, I'm still not convinced that I can either. Maybe that's as it should be. The most effective horror stories are the ones that creep and whisper and speak in tongues. They lead us into the dark and then abandon us to find our own way back out again.

This is not to paint Aickman as some avant-garde prose stylist, spinning gaudy riddles for his reader. On the contrary, The Hospice is told simply, almost flatly, with a minimum of jolts and rattles, as its humdrum hero – a travelling businessman called Maybury – finds himself lost on the road somewhere in the west Midlands, drifting through what appears to be an affluent 19th-century housing estate of tall trees and solitary houses. The Hospice promises "good food, some accommodation" and Maybury is almost out of petrol. He pulls up and steps inside.

"It's turkey tonight," coos the waitress, speaking to him as one would to a child. But the food is stodgy, overcooked and arrives in mountainous portions that he can barely choke down. Rising from his seat at the end of the dinner, Maybury notices "something most curious. A central rail ran the length of the long table a few inches above the floor. To this rail, one of the male guests was attached by a fetter round his left ankle."

The boarders at the Hospice sleep two to a room. They need the company; they hate to be alone. The central heating is turned up and the door is stuck fast and, on pulling back the bedroom curtains, Maybury finds a wall instead of a window. In the meantime, his bunkmate, Bannard, appears to slip out and then slip back again. But is it Bannard who comes back or someone else entirely? Maybury can't be certain. "All that goes on here is based on the simplest of natural principles," Bannard (if it is Bannard) tells him. "Eating good food regularly, sleeping long hours, not taxing the overworked brain."

Does anything actively awful happen in The Hospice? In the middle of the night there is a death that may well be a murder – conceivably perpetrated by one supporting character against another supporting character. Again, however, Maybury doesn't know and doesn't ask, which naturally leaves us none the wiser. The whole thing amounts to a dazzling feat of misdirection. "Reading Robert Aickman is like watching a magician work, and very often I'm not even sure what the trick was," writes the author Neil Gaiman. "All I know is that he did it beautifully. Yes, the key vanished – but I don't know if he was holding a key in his hand to begin with."

There's not another haunted-house tale that scares me quite so completely as The Hospice. It's a narcotic lullaby for Halloween; a tale that darkens and deepens with each re-reading; a blind, scurrying run past nameless terrors. What Aickman has done, I think, is write a horror story about the horror of people who are so scared of horror that they would do anything to avoid it. Mr Hyde might be out in the corridor, or creeping through the bedroom, or fettered to the rail, but poor Dr Jekyll refuses to look. The guests at the Hospice keep their heads down and the thermostat turned up. "It's turkey tonight," says the creepy waitress, who grows hurt and angry if the plates aren't cleaned. They grip their cutlery and set to work.

THE GUARDIAN