Seb was too preoccupied to smile.
‘Were they of any use?’ Mark asked, as he raised Hinderers in the Passage from the table.
Not a question that was easy for Seb to answer. He’d read parts of each collection after starting on them at around four a.m. He’d not attempted to return to sleep following the disturbance and had sat alone in his room with the television murmuring, drinking endless cups of coffee until Mark arrived.
The best two Hazzard stories, which resembled plotted short fiction, were the two stories that Seb had read years ago. Structured narratives, found in traditionally told stories, were absent in most of Hazzard’s work. The majority of the tales were better defined as surreal, weird imaginings, filled with ghastly images. Plots were added to some of the stories in the first anthology, though awkwardly, as if the recorded experiences were unsuited to logic.
The earlier stories were akin to cosmic fever dreams in which distant, astral shapes communicated with the narrators through sensations, and often before a background of blinding light.
The narrators were inveterate spies. Voyeurs with unscrupulous motives who often enacted revenge on earthbound rivals through the projection of malign versions of themselves. If the stories were biographical then the manipulations of Hazzard’s ‘astral body’, his gift no less, had never been put to positive use. In this respect the author appeared to have been a mentor to Ewan Alexander.
Had he read the books with innocent eyes, Seb might have been impressed by the author’s resistance to spells, rites, and rituals to evoke the supernormal. Unworldly phenomena was just there without question, and was always becoming within the ordinary world for those with special talents, those who had accessed other planes in a dreamy loosening of their consciousness.
Mythology was often referenced to attest to the existence of other places. Realms that folklore had long tried to encompass, or to explain. Hazzard had definitively explained the ghost, poltergeist, premonition, revenant, demon and angel. At least to himself.
The author always recounted stories from the point of view of the ghost, the astral double. The leaps of the imagination into fantastical spheres and celestially lighted realms had reminded Seb of Machen’s Hill of Dreams. But Hazzard’s spectral visitants were depicted as visionaries, explorers, sirens and femmes fatales, or playboys turned revenant. Authorial wishful thinking, perhaps, which failed to rid the works fully of the ordinary, mundane and unpleasant settings in which they must have been written, like prison.
The fetishistic adoration of female archetypes and their fashions, and the sinister voyeurism, persisted in each anthology.
By the last four stories in the first collection, the celestial light was dimming from the ethereal landscapes and had become grey and misty before fading to black; places filled with shadowy forms and strange cries from unseen faces.
The rising and flying ‘doubles’ stopped soaring and ascending to the heavens, their inner power and sense of greatness diminishing to what appeared to be a sickening habit. They began to stagger and crawl, not fly. Eventually, the narrators became captives to something they accessed against their wills. They were no longer tethered to the body or to the earth and its conditions. They were stricken and only saw one ill-defined region superimposed over another.
By necessity, life then became a struggle to keep the darkness from intruding upon the world. And separation from the body could happen randomly, at any time. Leaving the body became a permanent affliction, and the very promise of a dreadful destination. But it had all stirred a sense of awe within Seb too.
As Mark had alluded, the tone of the stories altered radically in the second volume. Those tales didn’t suit beginnings, middles and ends either, because all three conditions were often the same thing and there were few resolutions to the situations described.
In Hazzard’s final stories, the transcendent quality of the first collection had entirely degraded into the grotesque. An obsession with piercing light had conversely become an obsession with light’s absence. A peculiar terror akin to vertigo and of falling into the sky from the earth, and then falling even further beyond the earth’s atmosphere and into a cold and endless space, was a dominant theme. As an idea, travelling through space at dizzying speeds was soon replaced by a confinement in dreary rooms. Memories of places and situations were stuck on repeat.
The scale of infinity was transformed into an enclosed maze without end or purpose. The damp tunnel became a much-used metaphor. This was also the very realm that Seb now appeared to be glimpsing against his will.