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 12. The novel was first published in 2005. Spoilers ahead! CW for mention of sexual assault and the Holocaust.
“Round and round it went: there’s an evil thing you wouldn’t want to see at all.”
The morning after Mrs. Etchells’s death, Morris pops into Admiral Drive. He tells Alison about his new job: Aitkenside’s promoted to management, and the fiends have embarked on “a project.” He displays the modification of his earthside snake tattoo into a light-emitting “crimson ripple, sinuous,” slithering along his forearm.
Alison phones her mother. Emmie scoffs at Alison’s belief that Etchells was her grandmother—she told kids that to earn their trust, so she could “[offer] ‘em around the district to all comers.” Derek, who might be Alison’s father, wasn’t Etchells’s son but a kid she took in to “run errands.” Alison warns she’s coming to Emmie with “a few straight questions.” When Emmie starts talking to Gloria, Alison yells that Gloria’s dead. Cowed, Emmie says she knows this but forgets.
The presence of the fiends begins to sicken Alison. Morris reveals that they deliberately scared Etchells to death. He describes the “modifications” the gang underwent during training, like Aitkenside’s acquisition of four extra legs, the better to execute their project of “kicking out” illegal spirits who squat about the country without proper documentation. Their boss Nick’s “the manager of [them] all…in charge of the whole blooming world”. Alison should’ve been more respectful that time she saw Old Nick in Emmie’s kitchen. Alison pleads that she didn’t believe in the devil back then. Morris rejects the excuse: she should’ve learned how to pray. Now she and Colette and “that sad bastard” Mart don’t stand a chance.
After Etchells’s cremation, the psychics decide to search her house for a will. Alison doesn’t want to go, but Colette’s eager they be in on any loose “bundles of fivers” unearthed. Meanwhile Morris rambles about his earthside history, his current work harassing illegal spirits, his weekends off in the country to tamper with theme park rides.
Colette and Alison argue about evidence that Mart’s back in the shed. En route to Etchells’ house, they don’t speak.
They find the house emptied of furniture. Gemma suspects earthside thieves, Alison Pikey Pete. Pikey Paul appears and confirms Pete’s guilt. The psychics dowse for a will. Alison takes the upstairs, hoping to find her own birth certificate. Her improvised dowsing rods lead to a single “document”: a homemade receipt attesting that Emmie received from Etchells the sum of seven shillings and six-pence. Under Etchells’ signature is an odd scorched indentation that crumbles at Alison’s touch. They leave empty-handed, to find that vandals have inflicted claw-like scratches on Mandy’s car.
Back at Admiral Drive, neighbor Michelle insists Marty’s been creeping around again. On top of having lesbians next door, this is too much. Colette storms out to the shed. Alison follows, aware of the fiends crawling through the grass like commandos and pretending to nip her calves. Colette can’t get into the shed. Through its window, Alison sees why. Mart hangs from a noose; his body blocks the door. Turning, Alison sees him perched on the fence, swinging the oversized sneakers she bought him.
Police arrive, along with gaping neighbors. The forensic team puzzles over footsteps around the shed, including ones belonging to no ordinarily jointed human. They cut Mart down and take away the apricot “silk” he used for rope. Alison and Colette hole up in their unlighted house, too aware of judgmental scrutiny. Morris asks if Alison thinks they “was out of order” killing Mart. He wasn’t doing any good earthside, and they wanted a laugh. Besides, Aitkenside figured Mart could become a fiend-apprentice.
Alison’s ingratitude angers Morris, given how he saved Alison from being cut up worse by the boys, how he agreed with Emmie they should spare her face, lest Alison become a harder sell to the “punters.” Now Alison wants to fire Morris and quit the psychic business? He’ll mess up anything else she tries, and then she’ll come whining to him for money like she did as a kid. So she had peace while Morris was away ? How can she ever have peace—ten years old, and already with a man’s testicles on her conscience.
Alison’s scream of “What testicles?” rouses Colette. Alison’s behavior has become too much. She’s leaving now. Alison’s got plenty of company. Her own special sort of company. “I’ve got my memories,” Alison answers.
Colette calls Gavin, who reluctantly agrees to pick her up. She packs and dresses; on second thought, she changes clothes and puts on makeup to better compare with Gavin’s model girlfriend. She goes to the kitchen for tea. Alison startles her, dreamily coming to finger the knives and forks in the cutlery drawer. They don’t speak. Gavin arrives; Colette exits, dropping her keys into the letter slot by way of goodbye.
Unnecessarily dramatic, Alison thinks. She sits and rubs her feet. Cara has a method of foot massage that regresses clients through their past. Cara’s not around, so Alison will have to regress herself back to Aldershot, back to “the swampish waters of the womb, and maybe back before that: back to where there is no Alison, only a space where Alison will be.”
This Week’s Metrics
What’s Cyclopean: “Dead” is the word no Sensitive ever uses. Al breaks the taboo, acknowledging the tenuous and uncomfortable boundaries between earthside and airside.
This chapter’s vivid imagery award goes to tree saplings “bound to their posts like saints secured for burning.”
The Degenerate Dutch: Morris describes the fiends’ new work as “chasing out all spooks what are asylum seekers, derelicts, vagrants, and refugees”. Much like Al’s neighbors, fiends with nice yards.
Libronomicon: Al pleads ignorance in failing to recognize the devil: her mother’s house had no books, no paper except for a racing paper, nothing to help her get through Religious Education class.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Okay, the question about “modifications” at least is answered: they’re what you get before your ghost story gets turned into a blockbuster movie. Forked tongues, backwards knees, extra legs, all make for brilliant visuals on-screen and extremely distressing ones in the back row of your own performance. You can get them during an extension course on “foregathering” at Hell U (defeated since 6000 BCE). New, more disturbing question: foregathering before what?
Friend and occasional commenter Rush That Speaks told me a couple weeks ago that he not only couldn’t tell how this book would end, he couldn’t tell how it could end. Rush has a particularly impressive talent for untangling narrative structure, so this was a startling comment. Meeting up at a con this week, I asked for elaboration (and also permission to quote, thank you Rush). Previous chapters, he explained, have iterated at length on the literal and physical ghosts that hold Al down, preventing her escape from miseries both earthside and airside. It’s a pattern that should ultimately resolve in either tragic confirmation that escape is impossible, or a transcendent break from the miring past. Either direction requires set-up and foreshadowing—which Rush hadn’t picked up in either direction.
That lack of a route toward either tragic or transcendent catharsis is, I think, much of what’s distressed me so much about this readthrough. Every once in a while there’s movement—to a literal new place, to Morris’s departure, to his return stronger and worse—but the overall sense has been of failure not only to move but to take seriously the possibility of movement. Up to Chapter 11, Beyond Black feels like a nightmare where you attempt to run through a chest-deep swamp, trying to figure out whether the water is rising or just already too high.
Chapter 12 has movement aplenty, so while things are objectively getting worse, my experience as a reader is OH THANK THE AUTHOR THINGS ARE HAPPENING. One of those things is that Al’s size is depicted, for the first time, as an overt source of power and resilience. Her aura expands to corner Morris, to discomfit Colette even as she snarks about Al (on a diet, barely eating) being counted twice for catering. But this source of power is at risk. Al catches her foot fading in the bath. The fiends are trying to eat her away—it’s just taking a while, as it did during her earthside childhood. There’s enough of her to provide time for warning. Maybe even for resistance?
Other maybe-answers this chapter: Al’s mother claims that Mrs. Etchells isn’t her granny at all, is just a woman who took in girls who needed adult care, then sold them into prostitution. It’s unclear whether this is true, but Mrs. Etchells did do something parallel: raise Al into the life of a psychic, expel Morris as her own spirit guide, then (if I recall correctly) help convince Al that she couldn’t control his presence as her own guide. Morris, along with revealing this relationship to Mrs. Etchells, tells Al that she castrated at least one of the men who raped her. Good to know, and it alarms Al that she didn’t know. Which finally propels her to act decisively for more answers.
I haven’t mentioned Colette’s departure yet, have I? I will now mention it: good riddance. Colette’s been the maybe-living embodiment of the push against change, for becoming smaller and less powerful. And yet, she’s done the same thing to herself. Al, even now, has friends and colleagues to help, to offer respite and shelter; Colette only has her ex-husband to call for “rescue.” She is as she arrived, only more so: lifeless, beige, monstrous. But this book (we were reminded last chapter) is not about her.
The past-life foot massage suggests a last-minute shift in the direction of transcendence. Not so far as to make it certain, but at least to make it seek-able. Even if Al can’t escape from her ghosts—even if what they’re gathering “before” is a titularly bleak apocalypse in which everything descends into universal petty misery—perhaps she can understand where those ghosts came from.
Anne’s Commentary
Like fiends commando-creeping through the grass, Mantel’s narrative threads creep toward fruition. Now the fiends pretend to nip Alison’s calves; soon they may sink their fashionably sharpened teeth into her flesh with as much impunity as they once took knives to it. Mart succumbs to fiendish persuasion and hangs himself in the shed. Colette can no longer stomach Alison’s special needs and the garrulous ghosts of her past. She flounces out of their house after bullying Gavin into “rescuing” her. The neighbors will miss her no more than Mart—just one “lesbian” in the community, and the nicer one, is better than two.
In Chapter 12, Mantel’s genius for detail and sociopolitical criticism shine. Mart doesn’t dangle from scavenged construction-site rope. Remember how Alison’s apricot “silk” went missing? It’s pitch-damn perfect that the fiends steal it to off the object of Alison’s good actions. The deadening conformity and bourgeois paranoia of Admiral Drive’s residents gets further skewering as “the mums bowling home in their minivans and SUVs” collect to “[buzz] with shocked rumour” in front of the death-shed. Ethan tries to get camcorder footage inside Alison and Colette’s house. Michelle shouts from amidst the lookie-loos that it’s their fault Mart committed suicide in their neighborhood—they encouraged him to hang about! Another woman bemoans how local coverage of “the tramp [topping] himself” will hurt resale values.
Mantel envisions Hell as part criminal enterprise and part bureaucracy, with the Devil Himself as chief executive. Hell hath no fallen prince-of-angels at its head. It has leather-jacketed Nick, “the manager of us all…in charge of the whole blooming world.” For all their “modifications,” Morris and mates are more thugs-cum-apparatchiks than romantically demonic minions. To advance, a fiend has to get retrained, go on courses, undertake projects. Insubordinate fiends earn Nick’s wrath in the form of an agonizing pencil through the ear rather than a written reprimand. Efficient fiends get vacations and bonuses with which they may purchase performance-and-status-enhancing deformities. They brown-nose for favors, like permission to transact personal business without having to fill out the usual paperwork. There’s no mention of labor unions in Hell. Those higher on the uncivil service career-ladder can, however, take on apprentice fiends, as Aitkenside takes on Mart.
Poor feckless Mart. Let’s hope he can do better jobwise in death than in life.
Another way Mantel’s spirit world resembles ours is in its inequalities and us-versus-them mentality. The special project Nick assigns Aitkenside’s gang is to kick out of earthside positions “all spooks what are asylum seekers, derelicts, vagrants, and refugees,” basically all those that lack proper ID and documentation.
Poor feckless Mart. Let’s hope he doesn’t lose his Hell-papers.
The existence of Hell is established as an Escheresque dimension, both parallel to and intersecting with the earthside. Whether there’s a Heaven and a benevolent God remains uncertain. Alison’s hopes for redemption through “good actions” implies the existence of some supermundane moral authority. The psychics believe that spirits lingering earthside can pass over to a “higher” realm. Morris chides Alison that she “should have listened up in [her] history lessons,” particularly her “Hitler lessons,” as if the “Hitler lessons” epitomize earthside life. He says she should have “learned to say her prayers.” Why? So she would have someone besides mere humans “to put up against [Nick]”?
The question remains: What are Alison’s ghosts? That others like Mandy and Mart can experience the fiends indicates they’re somehow “real” rather than delusions or hallucinations. Also, they can wreak material havoc, like overnight messes in Colette’s pristine kitchen or furniture disappeared from Mrs. Etchells’s house—and they can leave footprints inexplicable to forensic experts. Alison could have made the messes, but would she have had the physical wherewithal to steal furniture or fabricate footprints?
On her way out, Colette sneers that Alison doesn’t need her. She’s “got plenty of company…[her] special sort of company.” Partnering with Alison, Colette’s come to believe at least sporadically in spirits. Ironically—perfectly—her parting shot draws from Alison the clearest yet definition of her ghosts: Yes, Alison says, “I’ve got my memories.”
So…are ghosts psychotic manifestations of trauma, the trauma being real, the ghosts metaphor? Do the memories of a genuine psychic have the power to become genuine haunts? Or are independently existent ghosts attracted to certain memories, such as those that feature their earthside lives? At the end of Chapter Twelve, we seem about to find out. Cara has told Alison about her latest “offering,” foot massages to regress clients into their pasts. After all this day’s new traumas, Alison’s determined to regress herself to “Aldershot, back to the dog runs and the scrubby ground,” and beyond, to the “swampish waters of the womb” and even to pre-existence, the mere potentiality of an empty space in the world, TBF, to be filled.
The chapter closes with Alison beginning, “delicately, tentatively,” to rub her foot. Whether that sends her back to Aldershot remains for the next chapter to tell. We can turn the page and go with her, can’t we? Sure, we’re no cowards.
Next week, join us to explore the ruins of Carcosa in E. Catherine Tobler’s “She Will Be Raised a Queen.” You can find it in Joseph S. Pulver Sr.’s Cassilda’s Song anthology.
Ruthanna Emrys is the author of A Half-Built Garden and 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.
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