Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we continue Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black with Chapter 6. The novel was first published in 2005. Spoilers ahead! Content warning for racism including slurs, and discussion of physical and sexual assault.
“And even though they needed frightening, even though they deserved frightening, she would never, when she was with her clients, slip a hint or tip a wink about the true nature of the place beyond back.”
Alison and Colette head to Nottingham and the first post-Diana Psychic Fayre. People crowd the M1 bridges to watch the funeral procession. Colette opines that if Diana had been “in real life,” she’d have ended up “with her arms and legs in left-luggage lockers and her head in a bin bag.” Alison hushes her—Diana might be listening. In the back seat, Morris warbles patriotic songs.
***
At a comfort stop, Morris makes his usual rounds. He pulls hubcaps off parked cars and newspapers off their racks. He sneaks among trucks, peering in windows and under cargo tarps.
He’s searching for someone to hang out with besides his “hostess” Alison and “stringy” Colette: old friends like Donnie Aitkenside or Pikey Pete or even Bill Wagstaffe. So far Morris and his mates haven’t “coincided” in the lorry parks of the dead.
Then, terrified of being left behind, he hurries back to Al’s car, smelling so strongly of “petrol and onions and hot dead feet” that even Colette detects the stink.
***
Alison and Colette check into the hotel where most of the psychics are staying. The Fayre venue is an old primary school, not a congenial setting for Alison, but she works the hall where her colleagues are setting up shop: Silvana, Cara, Angel, Raven, Merlin and Merlyn, her grandmother Mrs. Etchells, her particular friend Mandy. She introduces Colette and senses the others’ resentment that she has an assistant.
The Saturday night session runs late, as customers cry over Diana at length. To Alison “there was something gluttonous in their grief, something gloating.” Colette prowls the tables, eavesdropping; Alison wishes she wouldn’t be so obvious. One needs to preserve professional relationships. All the same, Alison wishes she could tell customers the real difference between her and the others: most of them can’t do it, and Alison can.
The psychics gather for a late buffet. Colette has imagined psychics discussing “well, things of the psyche.” Instead all they think about is money, the latest “tricks and fiddles.” And look at their ridiculous costumes and trinkets. Mandy at least asserts that the proof of psychic ability is “general client satisfaction.” Talk turns to Diana and her failed school exams. Alison relives an exam of her own, during which a dead mercenary chattered her to distraction. Mandy brings her back to the present.
Alone with Colette, Alison bemoans how clients expect her to clean their “dirty minds,” like some “sewage worker.” She quashes Colette’s suggestion of being “socially useful” by helping the police. As Colette records her objections, Alison relives the agonies of victims, the confines of their shallow graves. Called back by a frightened Colette, they begin a harrowing taping session.
Sunday morning Alison is ill, Colette shaken. Mandy’s also had a rough night—Morris invaded her room and harassed her, finally sticking “his filthy paw right up [her] nightie.” Alison apologizes—it’s not the first time Morris has molested Mandy. Her guilt extends to Colette, the “pale companion” fate-chosen for some as-yet-unrevealed advantage to Alison.
***
A smell of “rot and blight” fouls the car on their return home: Morris has finally “coincided” with his old gang. Aitkenside’s riding along, as is neophyte fiend Dean. They’ll pick up Pikey Pete shortly. At lunch, Alison draws the Tower card from her tarot deck. It signifies one’s life blowing up, she tells Colette, but the blow-up could simply be moving to a new house, as they should do. Somewhere Morris, or at least his chums, won’t find them.
Buy the Book
A House With Good Bones
Back home, Alison listens to last night’s tape, which now plays a conversation between Morris and mates about a bloke who claimed he could get Morris “restarted.” Morris thinks the scheme failed. Now Alison fears it almost succeeded. At the time of Morris’s rebirth attempt, Mandy got pregnant without remembering any sexual encounter. She had an abortion. Could Morris’s latest attack have been him trying for a surrogate mother?
Alison has to control Morris. And she needs to warn her mother about the fiends’ return. A man answers Emmie’s phone, but Emmie insists she’s alone. She hints at what happened to Alison in Aldershot, the men and the knives. She herself wouldn’t mind a reunion with the gang.
Wanting Colette’s “protection,” Alison starts for the living room, then reconsiders—let Colette have some peace. Turning back, she sees Diana manifest in the hall mirror, wearing a crumpled wedding gown pinned with press clippings. She asks Alison to give her love to her “boys,” but can’t recall their names.
Diana fades away. The recorder switches back on. Colette shouts that she doesn’t want “that stuff” in their book, so wipe the tape.
This Week’s Metrics
The Degenerate Dutch: Colette dismisses Princess Di: In “real life,” she’d have been “the sort of slag” who ends up with her body parts strewn about as messages or just hidden. Her boyfriend is an “ethnic” of the sort Al doesn’t “do”.
Morris, meanwhile, is awfully insistent about his heterosexuality. Either he’s actually “of the fairy persuasion” or he’s very used to getting beat up at any hint that he might be. He wants to get reincarnated, but only as a white guy in England. Silvana is passing as Romany for professional purposes. There’s a g-word and an n-word in this chapter somewhere too.
Libronomicon: The psychics at the fayre hock their own and others’ books: The Grimoire of Anciara St. Remy (forty spells with detailed diagrams), Master of Thoth (Merlin’s memoir), Casebook of a Psychic Detective (Merlyn’s memoir), The Truth About Exodus (Egyptians paid the Jews to leave, then we used the money to construct the Ark, then Jesus was born to the Pharaonic line, then everyone got very lost), Mountain K2: Search for the Gods (no details), The Lost Book of Enki (gods from space created humans to mine gold to enrich the atmosphere of their dying planet, then everyone got very lost).
Ruthanna’s Commentary
At some point I should probably confess that I don’t enjoy reading Beyond Black. It’s an extremely good book, doing interesting things with theme and genre and character. The third-person omniscient head-hopping is carried out with the skilled precision of a waltz, handoffs so smooth that it takes me a while to notice that I’ve switched partners and have spent paragraphs admitting that even Morris has agency and sympathetic interiority. It’s just that spending a chapter with Mantel’s characters makes me feel sad, directionlessly angry, and like I might perhaps secretly be a terrible person.
What I do enjoy is thinking about Beyond Black the day after, once I’ve recovered my perhaps-illusory-but-necessary sense of worth and direction. What I’m thinking about today is that choice to swing out from the two partners we’ve been treating as the core of the story—Al and Colette, and their wince-inducing relationship—to Morris.
Part of the mental work of egalitarianism is to acknowledge that all people have equal significance. It’s a philosophical concept that I’m most familiar with from Jo Walton’s Just City books, but has become a touchstone for remembering that even the most aggravating people, even those who do the most harm in the world, even those far outside my field of vision, have agency and interiority and thoughts and emotions. In fiction, though, one authorial decision is who among their characters actually gets these things—and gets these things shown to the reader, which of course isn’t the same thing. Even the most cast-of-thousands epic provides a smaller social universe than reality, and as readers we come to expect that some characters may be more richly simulated than others. That some may be symbols or sketches or archetypes or stereotypes.
Morris has previously served some combination of symbolizing everything that’s wrong in Al’s life, and one of those Shakespearian fools who’s passed so far beyond modern sensibilities that he comes out the far side into tragedy. Shakespeare, not a fool, knew well that the difference between clown and tragic villain is where the spotlight points and whether the audience laughs. Morris hasn’t been funny—and until now, hasn’t had the spotlight. I still hate him, but knowing that he’s lonely and even worse at making friends than he was when alive makes that hatred uncomfortable. Nor does it help to know that he’s merely a rapist foiled by being immaterial, but trying for a stranger sort of violation, foiled by Mandy’s determination to control her own body.
Desperation for rebirth, in a world of such dreary metaphysics, is a hell of a motivation. But Morris is the sort of person who, rather than asking his guide-ee to find him a willing host—which seems not impossible, given the number of stories about people making terrible supernatural deals to overcome infertility—forced himself on Mandy. Consent isn’t part of his mindset. It’s barely part of Al’s. She’s rarely had the opportunity to refuse assaults physical, sexual, or psychic. She struggles to find compassion for Princess Di as a real, dead, person; most people don’t bother. Al is more or less away from her mother, but stuck with her clients, with Morris, and now with Colette. Dealing with Morris’s friends is one of the few things that horrifies her enough to draw forth boundaries—and to set those boundaries, she’ll need to move, maybe more. Break down the tower, build something else.
Al’s not wrong about the Tower, by the way. In the Tarot, Death is merely a symbol of change—scary to slumber-party-goers pulling the deck down from beside that ouija board, maybe, but neutral to even a semi-skilled reader. In Neopagan circles, I usually heard that the three worst cards were The Tower, the Ten of Swords, and the Nine of Swords. They make an interesting combination, because where The Tower is catastrophic change and the Ten of Swords marginally less catastrophic change, the Nine of Swords is the catastrophic status quo. In traditional decks, it shows someone sitting up in bed, hands over face, swords hanging threateningly on the wall above. It’s the nightmare that you wake up from only to find yourself in that same nightmare.
That seems all too much like Al’s life. And for the Nine of Swords, The Tower is sometimes the only remedy.
Anne’s Commentary
In Beyond Black, Mantel writes like a superb driver at the wheel of the world’s smoothest-riding limousine. Cushioned in seemingly effortless prose, readers are carried toward the destination Mantel has chosen with no sense of powerful, of dangerous, propulsion. Or—they’d feel no sense of propulsion and danger if their chauffeur would keep the shades down in the VIP compartment so they didn’t have to see the unlovely exurbs and tourist-bait countryside they passed through. If she would keep the windows closed against the road noise and dust and smells. If she didn’t, at strategic points enroute, switch off the antigravity mufflers and drop them into potholes, some of them extinction-level craters.
Dame Hilary’s spirit laughs. You think that was an extinction-level crater? Wait, surely the road gets bumpier ahead. Besides, who needs an extinction event when one death can cause a national trauma, or the shady trauma-reactions enjoyed by dramaphiles and schadenfreuders.
Princess Diana dies. And dies youngish. And dies with a crash, not a whimper, under circumstances the tabloids can exploit for scandal. No wonder the psychic community braces for a storm, and gets one at a fayre fatefully scheduled on the very day of her funeral. Goodbye, England’s Rose.
And Dame Hilary, our chauffeur, opens the little window between driver and passengers to point out that those stubble-headed lads waving carnations on the bridge overhead would normally be dropping concrete blocks through our windshield. Also that heartfelt declaration DIANA, QUEEN OF OUR HEARTS is scrawled across a ragged bedsheet in letters crimson as virgin’s blood. Alison decries such a lack of respect. Schadenfreuder that she is, Colette thinks dirty linen is an apt metaphor for Diana’s life. How does one of Di’s first apparitions dare to appear in a portrait of Charles I, the Martyred King? Does Di think she’s a martyr, too, and if so, to what?
Portrait-bombing Diana wears a blood-red dress and tiara. The Diana Alison sees is less exalted and more poignant. Her most famous costume, that much-copied wedding gown, is now “crumpled and worn, as if dragged through the halls of the hereafter, where the housekeeping, understandably, is never of the best.” Princess-Bride Di died long before “real-life” Di did, but its raiment clung to her forever, affixed with ever more publicity and gossip, pulp-biography.
For all her celebrity, Diana represents the commonest kind of ghost that Alison deals with, the ones clamoring with messages for the living. There’s the old woman who’s been looking for Maureen Harrison these thirty year. The foot-crushed paramilitary soldier who wants his cousin John Joseph to know what happened. Diana wants Alison to give her love to her boys. That would be Princes William and Harry, but she can’t remember their names or find them among the clippings. Nor can she find the name of the particular man she wants to give her love to. There are too many words, and what she really wants from the living is privacy.
It’s a mercy, Alison thinks, when a spirit’s memories lapse sooner than later, detaching them from life. Those who remember enough to linger, who hunt for messengers, are suffering a purgatory. Leave the forgetful dead alone; their oblivion is comparative paradise.
Morris and company belong to the most dangerous category of the dead—those actively trying to be reborn. I guess these are the spirits who have ended up in hell, or is hell simply a post-mortem state of such discontent and restlessness that it wants to come back?
In Chapter Six, Mantel leads us from the closest we can get to sympathizing with Morris to the farthest away we want to get from him. While he sings patriotic ditties and plays poltergeistly practical jokes with hubcaps and periodicals, he approaches the whimsical-mischievous clown that Alison pretends her guide to be. His parking-lot search for lost mates is pathetic—poor lonely little multiply fractured ghost! From Morris’s point of view, what kind of a death is it to have only yammering females for company?
Not that his constant vulgarity and misogynistic and homophobic remarks aren’t pity-erosive, but couldn’t Morris almost be one of those pity-inducing grotesques that skulk through Dickens’ alleys and fens?
Morris loses sympathy points fast when he finds his cronies and packs them into Alison’s car. His score approaches zero when Alison connects Morris’s story about his botched rebirth with Mandy’s mysterious pregnancy the year before, and that pregnancy with Morris’s latest assault on Mandy.
Ghost Morris is bad enough. A Morris remade flesh is unthinkable. Ditto for his mates, even Bill Wagstaffe who recites lines from Hamlet and Richard II. The name Wagstaffe, by the way, reads like a reworking of the Bard’s. Wag-staffe, Shake-speare.
Well. A cultured fiend is still a fiend, yes?
Next week, the winter weather gets us in trouble on the road in Genevieve Valentine’s “Sooner or Later, Your Wife Will Drive Home”. You can find it in When Things Get Dark: Stories Inspired by Shirley Jackson.
Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden is out! She is also the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon and on Mastodon as [email protected], and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
