‘Because I think you’d be putting yourself in grave danger, Mark. Maybe even as much as I am in now. I wouldn’t ask a best friend, even a family member to do this for me, and I hardly know you. I don’t . . . this will sound funny, Mark, but I don’t want you on my conscience.’
‘Please. Call it professional curiosity.’ Mark then looked around himself, as if casting about the floor for the words that he wished to express. He tapped the two Hazzard books on the table. ‘Look, I haven’t been this excited about the SPR in years. Not since I saw your files. That whole project was incomplete for me. I barely scratched the surface of what was going on there. I know almost nothing about its peak years, in the sixties. But since you pitched up – you, Sebastian Logan, of all people – I’ve been so bloody excited by this again, and by Hazzard. It’s like Christmas. How many opportunities does a man like me get to hang out with one of his favourite writers, and to go with him to the place where Hazzard ran his cult?
‘If someone is there . . . if there are more files. Evidence. Just, wow. Wow. Fucking wow! It would actually be cruel if you prevented me from tagging along. I’d be going of my own free will.’
Seb started to grin because he knew that Mark Fry wasn’t exaggerating. It would be an act of cruelty to deny him participation.
Wasn’t it Seb that they wanted, not Mark Fry? And Mark knew more about Hazzard and the SPR than he ever would. Mark also knew how to find Hunter’s Tor Hall. Seb looked at his watch. ‘I want to go tomorrow.’
‘If I come down with you, I can still be back for Sunday. That gives me time to do the lesson planning I need to do before next week. I can do my marking on the train home. I’ll just need somewhere to crash for a night.’
‘There’s one more train after the one I’ve missed tonight. How long would it take you to get a bag together?’
21
Flight from Malignant Forms
‘Hazzard had a couple of disciples. Other writers,’ Mark offered as they chugged out of Exeter St David’s station, where the service had deposited most of the remaining passengers. ‘Did you know?’
They sat across from each other at a table in the middle of the Quiet Carriage at the rear of the train. Night had fallen. Beyond the windows the world was a blur of orange lights, half-seen landscapes, unlit industrial and agricultural buildings, a greyland. Between them on the table were strewn a litter of empty sandwich packets, coffee cups and four bottles of Doom Bar from the catering service. Victuals that had sustained them on the evening train.
‘Disciples? Which writers? Horror writers?’
‘Not really. Have you read Bertrand Webster?’
Seb shook his head. ‘But I know the name. He wrote science fiction?’
‘That’s what he’s known for. There’s a Masters collection coming out of a Bertrand Webster series. But he wrote three stories in the Hazzard vein at the end of his career. They came out in a small press, in the mid-nineties, but were picked up and reprinted in some ‘best of’ genre anthologies. When I read them, I was sure they were Hazzard stories, but they couldn’t have been because Hazzard was dead when they were written.’
Mark sat back and narrowed his eyes to a squint as if to aid his recall. ‘There’s one called “A Mere Sense of Identity”. And one called “The Long Dim Tunnel”. But “Wandering Down Eternal Corridors” is the best of the three. That’s very creepy and strange, about a building that never ends, full of the dead who don’t know that they’re dead. In fact, all three stories have “hinderers” in them. Hazzard’s best creation. Webster never wrote any horror, except for those three stories, which is a pity, because he was bloody good. But in the author comments at the end of the small press book, he called Hazzard “the criminally neglected master of the Strange Experience”. I never found out if Webster was part of the SPR, but I suspect he might have had a connection.’
‘You didn’t track him down?’
‘He was dead when I looked. Alcoholic, someone said on a message board. Drank himself to death in the late nineties after dropping from sight. The other writer, Moira Buchanan, topped herself in the late eighties. Don’t know much about her, but her Hazzard-influenced stories are really strange too. At one time, Buchanan wrote these big sagas about families in Scotland for libraries. All of her books are out of print now and there’s nothing supernatural in them at all. I read two of them and they were more like Gothic romances than anything else. But she dedicated her three horror stories to Hazzard as “the Master”. Right at the end of her career.’
‘Which is what M. R. James called Le Fanu.’