Tony Walker's Blog

Sales Conversion

When you have a book on Amazon you will know that there are certain devices Amazon does to draw attention to your book. When you first publish it it will appear in the new releases – and they will give extra exposure to that. They will also give exposure to you when you and do a kindle countdown. You get exposure on a special page that show shows which books are on countdown.

Both of these will help drive traffic to your book. You can use other devices off Amazon to drive traffic – you could use Facebook ads, or Google ad words, and of course you can use Amazon marketing services, the internal Amazon advertise advertising platform to drive traffic.

However your main concern should not be about driving traffic. Your main concern should be about converting that traffic into sales. But example you can get 100,000 impressions on a MS but if you have a low click through rate people are not going to people are not going to be buying your book.

So you need to do something to firstly attract clicks from impressions and then is to convert those clicks into sales.

When you get an impression of thumbnail image of your book with the title and possibly half a line of text will appear. That cover image that line of text need to be strong enough to induce anyone seeing it to click on it.

So actually what is driving them to look at your book may not actually be your work. Certainly it is not the book itself. And that is why it is worth investing in an image or a cover professionally done – you may be a professional cover design it yourself and in that case that's fine. Because it is so important because it is so important to use that coveting do you someone to click on it. In terms of the headline – we must be thinking of copywriting skills. And that is the whole industry in itself. There are plenty of resources for copywriting but you may want to visit the coffee blogger or the copy Hakka websites
One suggestion is that you have what they call a swipe file. That you keep your swipe all of those one-liners that if induced due to colic. You can then use their syntax and introduce your own words to induce others to click. I wouldn't worry too much about plagiarism here, the copy writing industry is famous for adapting the successful words of those suit of those who have gone before.

You will see if you visit the copy blogger website that they actually have a PDF file that you can download that lists a whole selection of formulaic headlines that have been shown to sell. If you have time and space on your advert it to get the second line in that second line must build on the first. Remember what you're writing is not a description of your story – it is an advertisement. And therefore and therefore you need to use the skills of the advertising agency.

If you do not feel sufficiently skilled in this way – because copywriting is a specialist form of writing. You can easily hire a copywriter from the site such as fiver for a relatively inexpensive fee. Or if you want to get to the bees knees then you might have to pay a bit more. But these are experts in their field and make a living by inducing people to click.

So if when you are looking at your advertising figures and you are seeing not many impressions, then as noted before that means your keywords or your product placement is not good. It could be that people are just not interested.

As a MS becomes more popular the cost per click of advertising increases. So you can expect now to pay $.75 for a click on the keyword romance for example. And that might even fairy depending on time and day.
You can go for what they call longtail keywords so instead of just romance which will be high traffic but expensive, you may find Hobbit romance if that is relevant to your book to be a lot cheaper and probably better targeted to your niche or audience.
So the number of impressions your ad is getting is related into the targeting of your keywords or if you are using product to display which products you are tagging onto.

Once you get the impressions on the customers page, and they are seeing your book cover and your headline then it is the job of the cover and the copy in the headline 20 something quick.

If you are scoring a click to impressions ratio of a round of less than 0.01% then for some reason there is something wrong with either your cover or your headline copy. It's simply not converting the impressions into clicks.

In that case you should go and look at your cover and your copy and experiment with the new cover or a new headline. It's probably best to change only one thing at once because if you change to you won't know which of those was the problem. As I said you should aim for better than 0.01% with my best books I've had around 2% conversion of impressions to clicks. As a rule of thumb you should be looking for one click put thousand oppressions.

If you do better than that – that's great.

So say you are actually getting the clicks what kind of conversion rate should you be looking at. Well as I said at the beginning the secret to selling anything is to give people what they want. There is no point having a product no matter how wonderful you think it is if nobody wants to buy it. It may be the new future years or as the fashion cycles around that your product will your book will become something people want to buy. Fruit sample once upon a time you can send a bug about vampires then everybody wanted to buy books about vampires until now are you will struggle to market a book about vampires. There are of course obvious exceptions to this rule. I'm thinking of those vampire books with half naked men vampires showing their abs on the cover.

Once you have got the click conversion from the impressions the next thing you need to do is to sell the book. You need to convert the click into a sale. Now if you getting a 10% conversion rate that's pretty good – I've had better than that for particular products that were at that time what people wanted to buy, for example a Christmas story at Christmas. You can imagine that after Christmas the conversion rate went down.

In hot new niche genres you will be getting a good conversion rate if there is not as many books on the market as the appetite of the readers.

However if you're getting a conversion around 5% that will seem okay. And what clinches that conversion from you – of course it's the cover and the add headline which you could reuse in your book description; but it is the but it is the book description which is again an advertisement rather than a description of your book in reality. That again has to be written as you would write a piece of sales copy.

A good Okey description with an excellent cover should sell your book.

Of course we haven't even talked about the book yet. Most people buy a book without reading it in before hand. Of course that's the whole purpose of it.

These days you can look at the first few pages on Amazon – and in fact that's what are used to do in bookshops in the old days I would look at the cover I would read the blurb on the back and then I would read the first couple of pages to see whether the style was something I liked.

How are you hope your reader on your first pages is a subject of a whole different discussion and there are some good books available on how to write affective hooks to draw the reader in in the first but I am assuming then to get your sale you need to have good keywords to get the impressions. From the impressions you need a good visible cover that you can actually reading thumbnail with a headline that is based on copywriting principles. That will induce the potential customer to click on your booking details page.

The detail page will have your book description again written that is it as an advertisement using copywriting skills. The cover is now seen on a bigger scale and has to be excellent of course. And then your writing itself – and this is the first time they will see your proper writing – and has to have a hug in it to draw the reader in. And if you have all of those three steps in place then you should be okay.

Of course that presupposes you are selling someone selling a book that people want to buy. 
There is a whole school of marketing that is about the con School of marketing – persuading a customer or even tricking them to buy something they don't want or need. That inevitably leaves a sour taste in the customer or in our case the readers mouth. You actually wanna sell your book to people you want to read it so don't even begin to think of a clever marketing trick is to try and con them. You wanted to draw your people to read your book. There is no point in conning people there is no point in calling people you aren't going to like your book to Byatt because they'll just leave you a stinking review.

Reviews

When you first publish your book and you still enough copies. Figure suggested to me is that you get a review per 50 to 100 copies for yourself. Some of those reviews are going to be five star fantastic. And you will love those people. However there will also be people who give you one stars. And on the Internet people are extremely rude. They will tell you your work is utterly worthless, but you're an imbecile, that you have no talent at writing, they will undervalue everything you do. And in the most brisk way.

And then you look at those reviews and you will cry and you're not sleep and you will rage and I don't want to find those people and kill them, but when you look at those reviews what you will find is that many of them are internally inconsistent. For example I had a review once that said that a particular story was predictable and directionless. I thought I thought well if it is predictable it can't be directionless because to be directional this is not to be predictable. Then you will have a review Sue will be right your grammar and they themselves be full of basic grammatical errors.

I think the key thing to do in the situation is to look at the same story, all the same piece of work, and compare the reviews it says your main character is interesting, that the story kept the reader gripped, and that they were into it from the first page. And put them alongside the review that says your main character is shallow, unbelievable, whiny and obnoxious.

I was reading an article on the Internet by Chuck Wendig, Who is commissioned to write a Star Wars sequel novel. He garnered 111 one star reviews. If you don't know Chuck Eendig you should read his blog. It is thoughtful, entertaining and above all funny.
Chuck had been talking to some representatives from Amazon, and they told him that as far as Amazon is concerned it is the number of reviews the drive is traffic. So the quality of the reviews, and what those reviews say it's not as important as the number of reviews you have on your book. That's an interesting fact, and I do not doubt that it is true.

The only time I would suggest that you take account of reviews is when they are not simple simply abusive or ecstatically praising, but when they point out something in your stories. Example I had one story where a couple of readers had pointed out that they would like extra description. One asked me to describe the main character more. The second suggested that I do more description of the physical world that the character inhabited – the objects in the room. I think that would both of these reviewers were suggesting was that I wasn't spending enough time anchoring the reader in the scene. Neil Gaiman One said, and I paraphrase, that when a reader tells you that they have an issue with something in your story, you should listen to them. Because even if they don't know exactly what the problem is they will have sensed that something is wrong. He also added that while they may be nearly always right incensing a problem, you should never take your advice on how to fix that problem, because it is nearly always wrong.

Litrpg

Funny thing happened to me recently. I started listening to podcasts about three months ago – specifically podcast about India office writing marketing and became a little bit of CEst but that's the thing number one. And then in addition to that I was in Lancaster and I picked up a cop copy of ready player one I am Skynet. I didn't get round to reading it until recently and I devoured it. I loved it and I've got decree of it and thought of playing games and all that stuff.

My history with these games is 30 in the late 1970s and I was just a kid I got a copy of Dungeons & Dragons rules. I Dodie played fancy wargames dragons is like a step up from that yeah do you clever micro adventures of a few people other than his. So I was sitting in playing that road and going out with my friends drinking.
And from that I also started playing online on the work online computer textbase cancer just bad stuff which I loved and an extra couple stepped-up was dungeon master which is in the tarragon butter especially for. And then that was it for strictly by computers just to play games specifically to make a requirement to those games. And the one of the big ones was alone in the dark and I got me into college call of Cthulhu.

So I continue to play games very much at the same time as trying to have a life and relationships. I then got into online games in the late 90s and is playing Avalon which is a tax post featuring but a multiplayer one.
I left Avalon I still do but after playing it for five years and not sucking for not spotting the max because I think minimax is the thing in online peaches even express ones

My next movies onto Dungeons & Dragons online. Of course I played other games such as Skyrim assassins Creed free for a chat love

And then I can address the late RPG genre my mind is blown

The decline of organic reach

I've been listening to a lot of marketing podcast recently and one of the things I've been hearing about is the so-called decline in organic reach. What disses chimes very much with my own experience over the years I've dabbled in the Internet and in the late 1990s and early to thousands it was really easy to get lots of traffic just by putting quality stuff on the Internet. The search engines and indexes notes and pickle to you without any effort.

However things have changed. Instead they look the same but things are very different. I've been puzzling about this sitting in my room and then what I was hearing from the podcasts reinforced my own experience. It seems the engines like Google and Facebook and to big companies have finally decided to come more commercial and outlook. I'm in a priority work commercial but they gave a lot of stuff away. And now it seems that they are only going to send you traffic if you pay them.

The other problem with God is there is just so much noise out there now. Once upon a time there were only five quality websites for providing information and say on contact towns. That was my area. And now I find that there are thousands of days and so we don't scroll down more than one or two pages on Google so if you are down of the page to no matter how good your cock your website it is you just aren't going to get seen.

I've even written a little blog about Cumbrian place names which is a pretty specialist area. If I say so myself it brings a lot of learning and scholarship and research to it and the post I put up tents high quality posts that will provide lots of information for people looking for that. But if I search for that lamps but if I search for that website I simply don't find it on on Google. So does that mean they're not a lot of websites about the subject? I don't think so.

So I think you days of putting stuff up and just hoping and actually succeeding in banks saying I'm gone. There's so much noise out there that even if your product is top quality unless you promoted using money probably more clever marketing techniques you won't get seen.

So that leads me onto my new endeavour – finding clever marketing techniques!

Emotion Machines

Recently become almost possessed by marketing. And I was thinking well what are we actually selling through the medium of stories? And clearly it's emotions. Now when you take that into account and you look at the bestseller list on Amazon – particularly the best selling categories, then that's quite interesting.

The bestselling category of all is romance with a R. So the emotion that the people who want to read those books are looking for is a kind of ... (I said vicarious but the app dictated carious love affair – I like the idea of the carious love affair - one that is full of holes. I've had a few like that. ) come to think of it though, looking for love through story sounds little bit insulting. But I don't mean it like that. I think fiction allows is to live lives and go places that we otherwise I'm free to do. However the fact that so many people want to read about other people's love affairs and thus create emotions in themselves suggests that there is an awful lot of people living without love.
The next best selling category is suspense/adventure. I guess hear this suggests that there are lots of people living quite boring lives would like to aspire to be a cop or a fire fighter or a jet pilot. Or even a spy.

And then there's erotica. I have even been guilty of writing erotica but not under my own name. What would my mother think! (I hope my mother doesn't read that kind of thing) what would I think if she did? Even so, I think my theory holds true. If people are reading erotica that suggested the kind of emotions and feelings that literature instills in them meets a need that they're not having met in their real life. 
There are lots of genres of course but I write horror. I have suggested that in writing and reading this kind of literature stories we are looking for an experience of the other – some kind of presence or intelligence that isn't human. But I guess it might be a lot simpler than that. It may just be people looking for some kind of entertainment. Because it is ultimately entertaining to have these emotions go through our bodies and minds in a controlled way. I may want to fantasise about being a jet pilot shooting enemies down and we never really want to do it. Or I may want  to imagine being in love with someone wonderful - a perfect woman or man but wouldn't really do anything about that because I'm very happy where I am. And  as for erotica I guess I may want to have those feelings and imaginings but never ever want to pursue them in real life.
I talked elsewhere about stories being a kind of inoculation. So it's about our fear of being predated being prey and getting eaten And it might be quite thrilling just to have a little bit of that but not too much. And I guess that's true about romance, suspense, erotica and all the rest.

I just want to have a dabble  at feeling things but not do them in real life and that's why they invented stories.

The Ghost of a Place (2)

I woke last night in the middle of the night and this is always a great time to think. I began to think about writing and some of the recent blog posts I've done on www.tonywalker.live.

I was trying to find what essence that is in common between all the things I do and write. I was listening to a marketing podcast by some guy whose name I forgotten – but he was speaking a lot of sense, at least it seemed to me. He said that if you listen to someone talking. then you will find what they're interested in. He said some people will always talk to people about parenting or sports, or cars of writing. That's how you can identify their key themes.

In my case it's always been about ghosts, the paranormal,the feeling that you get in certain places. And that really is the key theme in my work. I see that I write about places I've been and when I wonder why I've gone to these places it's because of this feeling of numinosityy that I am looking for. In the ancient cultures of Europe and Asia and America the Native Americans and the South American native peoples and in Australia, in fact all over the world there are certain places which are set apart is being sacred.
This is the Temenos - the sacred lying around the place where people went to see the gods. And I know that I've always been interested in going to places like that in the UK - at Glastonbury, Iona Lindisfarne - in fact the whole of Wales for me - Cornwall, the list goes on. And when I go on holiday abroad to Japan are Europe or America I find myself going to temples and sacred sites.

I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I used to run ghost tours. How that started it was that I wanted to go to these places myself and show people what there was to be seen or more exactly what there was to be felt in them. You may have read about the dragon energy in the stone circles. This was a project done in the 1970s and that they found this bizarre energy in certain places that was partly electromagnetic. I had a funny experience this year at Avebury stone circle in the south of England. And here there is a village have - a pretty, old village – surrounded by stone circle and I was trying to find with my compass at East and kept spinning round it was most bizarre.



So,  I used to run goes tours and I used to go to old castles and very atmospheric buildings and put on these Cthulhu mythos murder mysteries. That was set in the 1920s so I got to got to dress up but instead of being a Miss Marple or Agatha Christie thing it ended up being some horrible tentacled monster or a Dimensional Shambler going to get you. It was great fun but it was an attempt to artificially create this feeling of the Other. And I see that in my writing - I tend to go to that again and again/  I tend to talk about places in my writing very specifically and link it to this feeling of something else being there. Now this could be a monster or a ghost or just a feeling that there is some intelligence that that isn't human. And I guess ultimately I'm looking for God. Whatever that means.

But how does that link to this blog? I think that I'm trying to share with you my discoveries - so my discoveries about books and films and especially places where we can get that special feeling that there may be something there , something more mysterious something that reminds us that we not alone that there is an intelligence in this world that is in human

By the way, did you hear that we've found signals from aliens finally?

Follow me on Twitter for a lot of tweets about this kind of stuff @bigtonywalker

Amazon unlimited

I recently signed up for Amazon unlimited. It was the  month's free subscription that got my attention. You may have noticed that I have been a little bit manic this past month. And I’ve been devouring books about digital marketing. The trouble with these books is that the writers promote them fiercely and tell you that they're the best thing since sliced bread: their book is the one that’s going to give you all the secrets that will help you break through. Before reading them you can’t really judge. Many of them have hundreds of positive reviews and that might be genuine or it might actually be because they’ve paid people or influenced people to write a good review.

I’m going to reserve this blog here (Thoughts from the Microcosm) by the way from my thoughts about writing while my WordPress blog is the one I’m going to use for thoughts about the macabre bra (I left that dictation error in because I thought it was funny) and ghosts and alchemy and magic and haunted places.

Anyway, I was looking at all of these apparently indispensable books and thinking these books are going for $4.99 each. And there are lots of them!

And then Amazons advert caught my eye-and that’s what Amazon is really good at. Amazon unlimited is the answer-it’s £7.99 for a month but the first month it’s a free trial. You can have 10 books out at any time and this allows me to get any book out then I want and most of these books on marketing and writing are actually in Amazon unlimited.

I’ve also picked up a lot of criticism from writers about Amazon unlimited. Apparently they pay you half a cent  per page read so on average writers are earning half as much as they would from lending a book out compared to selling it. And a lot of advice from writers has been to  avoid Amazon unlimited. I can see this from a writer’s point of view however I think subscription services certainly have a large part to play in the future development of reading. So like it or lump it, I think we stuck with subscription services such as Amazon unlimited. That’s the view from the writer’s point of view however from the readers point of view  I think it’s wholly positive.

So I’ve been able to go through the books at great speed both  the good ones and bad ones. To be honest there are many that I wouldn’t have bought but when I read them I found I have some very useful information in them. I would never have got to see that without Amazon unlimited. Simply because I wouldn’t of shelled out 5 pounds for the privilege of seeing whether this was trash or valuable.

So I think it’s a good deal. You can actually get out a ton of books in your first free month without paying a penny and read what would’ve cost you a whole lot of money. So I would recommend that you sign up for Amazon unlimited and read as many books as you want for the first month and then if you don’t like it you simply cancel your subscription

You could even read my books!

And guess what I dictated this whole piece was sitting in the car by the side of a busy road. That’s not bad is it?

City of the Alchemists – Magical Prague.

 

“It’s a fairytale town, isn’t it?” To misappropriate a quote from In Bruges.  Almost a year ago, the beloved Sheila and myself took a trip to Prague. It was very beautiful – the Christmas trees were all out and the market was in full swing. If you’ve never been to Prague, just go. It’s like a fairytale of a middle European city.  But I had ulterior motives. I am partway through my Alchemical Tour of Europe. Several years ago, I became very interested in alchemy (prompted by Jung’s work on it) , and I decided to tour alchemical spots.  The thread to this is mainly Edward Kelly and John Dee’s travels and travails in the 16th Century.

Their collaboration began in London in the early 1580s. Dee was a mathematician and magician and famously astrological adviser to Queen Elizabeth I of England. But Dee was hungry to speak to angels and learn the secrets of the Universe. There is much to know about all of this, and I’m not going to tell you. Google is your friend, if you’re interested, but many reading this will already know. Edward Talbot later Kelley was a world apart from the intellectual and credulous Dee. Kelley was Dee’s seer, who looked into Dee’s shewstone and reported back what the spirits showed and said to him.  This is documented in A True and Faithful Relation and   It has been said that Kelley was a charlatan.  Kelley and Dee are supposed to have found a red powder at Glastonbury, that famous sacred site in England. They used this red powder to turn base metal into gold. Of course, Jung says this is a metaphor for the transformation of the Ego into the Self, but most people believed that the transformation of lead into gold was the thing in itself.  The good people of Mortlake, now a suburb of London, turned on Dee and burned his house. It may also that he fell out of political favour. In any case, they took up with a Polish nobleman and moved to Krakow where they contacted angels and began to transcribe the language of the angels, named after the Biblical Book of Enoch – Enochian.  When that fell apart, they were on the run again and fled to the capital of the alchemists at that time – Prague.  There were visits from angels and the angels even told Kelley to tell Dee to have their wives in common. Dee returned to England, leaving Kelley who was apparently thrown from one of the castle towers. They were always throwing people out of windows in Prague of course.

I’ve been to Krakow before and am going again at the end of November.  My previous alchemical trip was to Heidelburg, which I will write up. I have yet to go to Chartres, to follow Fulcanelli and his Le Mystère des Cathédrales, though I will.

So, this is what happened. One day we took a tram up to the castle on the far side. It was a cold winter’s day and we walked up through some suburban streets past sinister looking military facilties with lots of cameras. We visited the castle and the Golden Alley where the alchemists had been housed.  Then we walked through the old town. Later we went to the Strahov Monastery on the Petrin Hills.  I wanted to go there because in 2000 I played Vampire the Masquerade – Redemption where the monastery is a nest of vampires and the Petrin Hills and woods are full of the bloodsuckers. The place was strangely quiet and it was possible to kid oneself that they were there asleep, merely waiting for night to fall. We walked back through the woods, getting strangely lost. We visited a mirror maze up near the Camera Obscura tower at the top of the hills and then came across the strangest little house where there was free wine and odd men with beards and long hair were very kind to us. Very kind. Too kind. One guy reminded me of Mr Tumnus. His house was like that.

We went to the nicely done Museum of Alchemists, in what was supposed to be Kelley’s house after Dee went home. There’s even a pub there called Pub Kellyxir (get it?).  Which reminds me of that song Drink the Elixir by Salad.

Just imagine walking down those cobbled streets with those magical houses. The air is cold and you stop to get a cinammon pastry from one of the shops. The Christmas lights are twinkling and people walk by, their breath coming in clouds. You just need a beer. So you get one. And everything is even better and suffused with that warm, fluffy beer haze.  That’s a kind of alchemy, though not the one I went to Prague for.

We also visited Dee and Kelley’s house, known as the Faust House because it is said that Faust, who like didn’t even exist, had lived there and made his famous pact with the Old Lad, Prince of the Air there.  There is a blue light that is supposed to mysteriously emanate from the cellar of the Faust House, but I never saw it. Nearby are great Czech pubs serving lovely dark beer (did I mention the beer?).

So, did I find what I was looking for in those lovely streets? Yes and no. Prague is a Box of Delights. As for finding the True Gold, the Elixir of Life, the Stone of the Alchemists – well as the Irish say – if you go to Rome but don’t take Jesus with you, you won’t find him there.

Ain’t that the truth. And then there’s Bruges…

William Peter Blatty ‘The Exorcist’ Review

Good review of a classic horror novel

Horror Novel Reviews

Written by: David Blackthorn

Every genre has definitive works that set a standard.  For twenty first century horror, The Exorcist is one of these definitive works.  Anyone who enjoyed the movie should take the time to read the book which preceded it.  The depth of the novel surpasses the film.  The story line goes further, has more characters and sheds light on some things missing from the screenplay.  This is not at all unusual, the books are usually more thorough.

So, what can be said about William Peter Blatty’s novel of a demon possessed girl?  The story is disturbing and stays with you after you’re finished.  Isn’t that what we look for in a horror novel?  If it has a shocking impact, then the writer has done their job and done it well.  Blatty does that with The Exorcist and does it very well.

The characters are very well developed, better than the movie.  Father Damien Karris, battling his crisis…

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Negotium Perambulans by E. F. Benson

So here I am posting a second  E. F. Benson story! I first came across this in an anthology of those stories that H. P. Lovecraft had said were “powerful”.  I think the monster in this inspired the monster in my own story Dark Water.  The atmosphere is fantastic. I know that other critics have not looked so favourably on this story, but I like Cornwall (due to being forced to go to Cornish lessons long years ago so I can still say Yth esof fy ow mos dhe’n chy byhan with the best of them.)  I once took a holiday in Cornwall at the dark time of the year (February to you) and the mood of the place is awesome. Anyway, here’s E. F.

***

The casual tourist in West Cornwall may just possibly have noticed, as he bowled along over the bare high plateau between Penzance and the Land’s End, a dilapidated signpost pointing down a steep lane and bearing on its battered finger the faded inscription “Polearn 2 miles,” but probably very few have had the curiosity to traverse those two miles in order to see a place to which their guide-books award so cursory a notice. It is described there, in a couple of unattractive lines, as a small fishing village with a church of no particular interest except for certain carved and painted wooden panels (originally belonging to an earlier edifice) which form an altar-rail. But the church at St. Creed (the tourist is reminded) has a similar decoration far superior in point of preservation and interest, and thus even the ecclesiastically disposed are not lured to Polearn. So meagre a bait is scarce worth swallowing, and a glance at the very steep lane which in dry weather presents a carpet of sharp-pointed stones, and after rain a muddy watercourse, will almost certainly decide him not to expose his motor or his bicycle to risks like these in so sparsely populated a district. Hardly a house has met his eye since he left Penzance, and the possible trundling of a punctured bicycle for half a dozen weary miles seems a high price to pay for the sight of a few painted panels.

Polearn, therefore, even in the high noon of the tourist season, is little liable to invasion, and for the rest of the year I do not suppose that a couple of folk a day traverse those two miles (long ones at that) of steep and stony gradient. I am not forgetting the postman in this exiguous estimate, for the days are few when, leaving his pony and cart at the top of the hill, he goes as far as the village, since but a few hundred yards down the lane there stands a large white box, like a sea-trunk, by the side of the road, with a slit for letters and a locked door. Should he have in his wallet a registered letter or be the bearer of a parcel too large for insertion in the square lips of the sea-trunk, he must needs trudge down the hill and deliver the troublesome missive, leaving it in person on the owner, and receiving some small reward of coin or refreshment for his kindness.

But such occasions are rare, and his general routine is to take out of the box such letters as may have been deposited there, and insert in their place such letters as he has brought. These will be called for, perhaps that day or perhaps the next, by an emissary from the Polearn post-office.

As for the fishermen of the place, who, in their export trade, constitute the chief link of movement between Polearn and the outside world, they would not dream of taking their catch up the steep lane and so, with six miles farther of travel, to the market at Penzance. The sea route is shorter and easier, and they deliver their wares to the pier-head. Thus, though the sole industry of Polearn is sea-fishing, you will get no fish there unless you have bespoken your requirements to one of the fishermen. Back come the trawlers as empty as a haunted house, while their spoils are in the fish-train that is speeding to London.

Such isolation of a little community, continued, as it has been, for centuries, produces isolation in the individual as well, and nowhere will you find greater independence of character than among the people of Polearn. But they are linked together, so it has always seemed to me, by some mysterious comprehension: it is as if they had all been initiated into some ancient rite, inspired and framed by forces visible and invisible. The winter storms that batter the coast, the vernal spell of the spring, the hot, still summers, the season of rains and autumnal decay, have made a spell which, line by line, has been communicated to them, concerning the powers, evil.and good, that rule the world, and manifest themselves in ways benignant or terrible . . .

I came to Polearn first at the age of ten, a small boy, weak and sickly, and threatened with pulmonary trouble. My father’s business kept him in London, while for me abundance of fresh air and a mild climate were considered essential conditions if I was to grow to manhood. His sister had married the vicar of Polearn, Richard Bolitho, himself native to the place, and so it came about that I spent three years, as a paying guest, with my relations. Richard Bolitho owned a fine house in the place, which he inhabited in preference to the vicarage, which he let to a young artist, John Evans, on whom the spell of Polearn had fallen for from year’s beginning to year’s end he never let it. There was a solid roofed shelter, open on one side to the air, built for me in the garden, and here I lived and slept, passing scarcely one hour out of the twenty-four behind walls and windows. I was out on the bay with the fisher-folk, or wandering along the gorse-clad cliffs that climbed steeply to right and left of the deep combe where the village lay, or pottering about on the pier-head, or bird’s-nesting in the bushes with the boys of the village.

Except on Sunday and for the few daily hours of my lessons, I might do what I pleased so long as I remained in the open air. About the lessons there was nothing formidable; my uncle conducted me through flowering bypaths among the thickets of arithmetic, and made pleasant excursions into the elements of Latin grammar, and above all, he made me daily give him an account, in clear and grammatical sentences, of what had been occupying my mind or my movements. Should I select to tell him about a walk along the cliffs, my speech must be orderly, not vague, slip-shod notes of what I had observed. In this way, too, he trained my observation, for he would bid me tell him what flowers were in bloom, and what birds hovered fishing over the sea or were building in the bushes. For that I owe him a perennial gratitude, for to observe and to express my thoughts in the clear spoken word became my life’s profession.

But far more formidable than my weekday tasks was the prescribed routine for Sunday.

Some dark embers compounded of Calvinism and mysticism smouldered in my uncle’s soul, and made it a day of terror. His sermon in the morning scorched us with a foretaste of the eternal fires reserved for unrepentant sinners, and he was hardly less terrifying at the children’s service in the afternoon. Well do I remember his exposition of the doctrine of guardian angels. A child, he said, might think himself secure in such angelic care, but let him beware of committing any of those numerous offences which would cause his guardian to turn his face from him, for as sure as there were angels to protect us, there were also evil and awful presences which were ready to pounce; and on them he dwelt with peculiar gusto. Well, too, do I remember in the morning sermon his commentary on the carved panels of the altar-rails to which I have already alluded.

There was the angel of the Annunciation there, and the angel of the Resurrection, but not less was there the witch of Endor, and, on the fourth panel, a scene that concerned me most of all.

This fourth panel (he came down from his pulpit to trace its time-worn features) represented the lych-gate of the church-yard at Polearn itself, and indeed the resemblance when thus pointed out was remarkable. In the entry stood the figure of a robed priest holding up a Cross, with which he faced a terrible creature like a gigantic slug, that reared itself up in front of him. That, so ran my uncle’s interpretation, was some evil agency, such as he had spoken about to us children, of almost infinite malignity and power, which could alone be combated by firm faith and a pure heart. Below ran the legend “Negotium perambulans in tenebris” from the ninety-first Psalm. We should find it translated there, “the pestilence that walketh in darkness,” which but feebly rendered the Latin. It was more deadly to the soul than any pestilence that can only kill the body:

it was the Thing, the Creature, the Business that trafficked in the outer Darkness, a minister of God’s wrath on the unrighteous ….I could see, as he spoke, the looks which the congregation exchanged with each other, and knew that his words were evoking a surmise, a remembrance. Nods and whispers passed between them, they understood to what he alluded, and with the inquisitiveness of boyhood I could not rest till I had wormed the story out of my friends among the fisher-boys, as, next morning, we sat basking and naked in the sun after our bathe. One knew one bit of it, one another, but it pieced together into a truly alarming legend. In bald outline it was as follows:

A church far more ancient than that in which my uncle terrified us every Sunday had once stood not three hundred yards away, on the shelf of level ground below the quarry from which its stones were hewn. The owner of the land had pulled this down, and erected for himself a house on the same site out of these materials, keeping, in a very ecstasy of wickedness, the altar, and on this he dined and played dice afterwards. But as he grew old some black melancholy seized him, and he would have lights burning there all night, for he had deadly fear of the darkness. On one winter evening there sprang up such a gale as was never before known, which broke in the windows of the room where he had supped, and extinguished the lamps. Yells of terror brought in his servants, who found him lying on the floor with the blood streaming from his throat. As they entered some huge black shadow seemed to move away from him, crawled across the floor and up the wall and out of the broken window.

“There he lay a-dying,” said the last of my informants, “and him that had been a great burly man was withered to a bag o’ skin, for the critter had drained all the blood from him. His last breath was a scream, and he hollered out the same words as passon read off the screen.”

“Negotium perambulans in tenebris,” I suggested eagerly.

“Thereabouts. Latin anyhow.”

“And after that?” I asked.

“Nobody would go near the place, and the old house rotted and fell in ruins till three years ago, when along comes Mr. Dooliss from Penzance, and built the half of it up again. But he don’t care much about such critters, nor about Latin neither. He takes his bottle of whisky a day and gets drunk’s a lord in the evening. Eh, I’m gwine home to my dinner.”

Whatever the authenticity of the legend, I had certainly heard the truth about Mr. Dooliss from Penzance, who from that day became an object of keen curiosity on my part, the more so because the quarry-house adjoined my uncle’s garden. The Thing that walked in the dark failed to stir my imagination, and already I was so used to sleeping alone in my shelter that the night had no terrors for me. But it would be intensely exciting to wake at some timeless hour and hear Mr. Dooliss yelling, and conjecture that the Thing had got him.

But by degrees the whole story faded from my mind, overscored by the more vivid interests of the day, and, for the last two years of my out-door life in the vicarage garden, I seldom thought about Mr. Dooliss and the possible fate that might await him for his temerity in living in the place where that Thing of darkness had done business. Occasionally I saw him over the garden fence, a great yellow lump of a man, with slow and staggering gait, but never did I set eyes on him outside his gate, either in the village street or down on the beach. He interfered with none, and no one interfered with him. If he wanted to run the risk of being the prey of the legendary nocturnal monster, or quietly drink himself to death, it was his affair. My uncle, so I gathered, had made several attempts to see him when first he came to live at Polearn, but Mr.

Dooliss appeared to have no use for parsons, but said he was not at home and never returned the call.

After three years of sun, wind, and rain, I had completely outgrown my early symptoms and had.become a tough, strapping youngster of thirteen. I was sent to Eton and Cambridge, and in due course ate my dinners and became a barrister. In twenty years from that time I was earning a yearly income of five figures, and had already laid by in sound securities a sum that brought me dividends which would, for one of my simple tastes and frugal habits, supply me with all the material comforts I needed on this side of the grave. The great prizes of my profession were already within my reach, but I had no ambition beckoning me on, nor did I want a wife and children, being, I must suppose, a natural celibate. In fact there was only one ambition which through these busy years had held the lure of blue and far-off hills to me, and that was to get back to Polearn, and live once more isolated from the world with the sea and the gorse-clad hills for play-fellows, and the secrets that lurked there for exploration. The spell of it had been woven about my heart, and I can truly say that there had hardly passed a day in all those years in which the thought of it and the desire for it had been wholly absent from my mind. Though I had been in frequent communication with my uncle there during his lifetime, and, after his death, with his widow who still lived there, I had never been back to it since I embarked on my profession, for I knew that if I went there, it would be a wrench beyond my power to tear myself away again. But I had made up my mind that when once I had provided for my own independence, I would go back there not to leave it again. And yet I did leave it again, and now nothing in the world would induce me to turn down the lane from the road that leads from Penzance to the Land’s End, and see the sides of the combe rise steep above the roofs of the village and hear the gulls chiding as they fish in the bay. One of the things invisible, of the dark powers, leaped into light, and I saw it with my eyes.

The house where I had spent those three years of boyhood had been left for life to my aunt, and when I made known to her my intention of coming back to Polearn, she suggested that, till I found a suitable house or found her proposal unsuitable, I should come to live with her.

“The house is too big for a lone old woman,” she wrote, “and I have often thought of quitting and taking a little cottage sufficient for me and my requirements. But come and share it, my dear, and if you find me troublesome, you or I can go. You may want solitude — most people in Polearn do — and will leave me. Or else I will leave you: one of the main reasons of my stopping here all these years was a feeling that I must not let the old house starve. Houses starve, you know, if they are not lived in. They die a lingering death; the spirit in them grows weaker and weaker, and at last fades out of them. Isn’t this nonsense to your London notions?…”

Naturally I accepted with warmth this tentative arrangement, and on an evening in June found myself at the head of the lane leading down to Polearn, and once more I descended into the steep valley between the hills. Time had stood still apparently for the combe, the dilapidated signpost (or its successor) pointed a rickety finger down the lane, and a few hundred yards farther on was the white box for the exchange of letters. Point after remembered point met my eye, and what I saw was not shrunk, as is often the case with the revisited scenes of childhood, into a smaller scale. There stood the post-office, and there the church und close beside it the vicarage, and beyond, the tall shrubberies which separated the house for which I was bound from the road, and beyond that again the grey roofs of the quarry-house damp and shining with the moist evening wind from the sea. All was exactly as I remembered it, and, above all, that sense of seclusion and isolation. Somewhere above the tree-tops climbed the lane which joined the main road to Penzance, but all that had become immeasurably distant. The years that had passed since last I turned in at the well-known gate faded like a frosty breath, and vanished in this warm, soft air. There were law-courts somewhere in memory’s dull book which, if I cared to turn the pages, would tell me that I had made a name and a great income there. But the dull book was.closed now, for I was back in Polearn, and the spell was woven around me again.

And if Polearn was unchanged, so too was Aunt Hester, who met me at the door. Dainty and china-white she had always been, and the years had not aged but only refined her. As we sat and talked after dinner she spoke of all that had happened in Polearn in that score of years, and yet somehow the changes of which she spoke seemed but to confirm the immutability of it all. As the recollection of names came back to me, I asked her about the quarry-house and Mr. Dooliss, and her face gloomed a little as with the shadow of a cloud on a spring day.

“Yes, Mr. Dooliss,” she said, “poor Mr. Dooliss, how well I remember him, though it must be ten years and more since he died. I never wrote to you about it, for it was all very dreadful, my dear, and I did not want to darken your memories of Polearn. Your uncle always thought that something of the sort might happen if he went on in his wicked, drunken ways, and worse than that, and though nobody knew exactly what took place, it was the sort of thing that might have been anticipated.”

“But what more or less happened, Aunt Hester?” I asked.

“Well, of course I can’t tell you everything, for no one knew it. But he was a very sinful man, and the scandal about him at Newlyn was shocking. And then he lived, too, in the quarry-house…

I wonder if by any chance you remember a sermon of your uncle’s when he got out of the pulpit and explained that panel in the altar-rails, the one, I mean, with the horrible creature rearing itself up outside the lych-gate?”

“Yes, I remember perfectly,” said I.

“Ah. It made an impression on you, I suppose, and so it did on all who heard him, and that impression got stamped and branded on us all when the catastrophe occurred. Somehow Mr.

Dooliss got to hear about your uncle’s sermon, and in some drunken fit he broke into the church and smashed the panel to atoms. He seems to have thought that there was some magic in it, and that if he destroyed that he would get rid of the terrible fate that was threatening him. For I must tell you that before he committed that dreadful sacrilege he had been a haunted man: he hated and feared darkness, for he thought that the creature on the panel was on his track, but that as long as he kept lights burning it could not touch him. But the panel, to his disordered mind, was the root of his terror, and so, as I said, he broke into the church and attempted — you will see why I said ‘attempted’ — to destroy it. It certainly was found in splinters next morning, when your uncle went into church for matins, and knowing Mr. Dooliss’s fear of the panel, he went across to the quarry-house afterwards and taxed him with its destruction. The man never denied it; he boasted of what he had done. There he sat, though it was early morning, drinking his whisky.

“‘I’ve settled your Thing for you,’ he said, ‘and your sermon too. A fig for such superstitions.’ “Your uncle left him without answering his blasphemy, meaning to go straight into Penzance and give information to the police about this outrage to the church, but on his way back from the quarry-house he went into the church again, in order to be able to give details about the damage, and there in the screen was the panel, untouched and uninjured. And yet he had himself seen it smashed, and Mr. Dooliss had confessed that the destruction of it was his work. But there it was, and whether the power of God had mended it or some other power, who knows?”

This was Polearn indeed, and it was the spirit of Polearn that made me accept all Aunt Hester was telling me as attested fact. It had happened like that. She went on in her quiet voice.

“Your uncle recognised that some power beyond police was at work, and he did not go to Penzance or give informations about the outrage, for the evidence of it had vanished.”.A sudden spate of scepticism swept over me.

“There must have been some mistake,” I said. “It hadn’t been broken…”

She smiled.

“Yes, my dear, but you have been in London so long,” she said. “Let me, anyhow, tell you the rest of my story. That night, for some reason, I could not sleep. It was very hot and airless; I dare say you will think that the sultry conditions accounted for my wakefulness. Once and again, as I went to the window to see if I could not admit more air, I could see from it the quarry-house, and I noticed the first time that I left my bed that it was blazing with lights. But the second time I saw that it was all in darkness, and as I wondered at that, I heard a terrible scream, and the moment afterwards the steps of someone coming at full speed down the road outside the gate. He yelled as he ran; ‘Light, light!’ he called out. ‘Give me light, or it will catch me!’ It was very terrible to hear that, and I went to rouse my husband, who was sleeping in the dressing-room across the passage. He wasted no time, but by now the whole village was aroused by the screams, and when he got down to the pier he found that all was over. The tide was low, and on the rocks at its foot was lying the body of Mr. Dooliss. He must have cut some artery when he fell on those sharp edges of stone, for he had bled to death, they thought, and though he was a big burly man, his corpse was but skin and bones. Yet there was no pool of blood round him, such as you would have expected. Just skin and bones as if every drop of blood in his body had been sucked out of him!”

She leaned forward.

“You and I, my dear, know what happened,” she said, “or at least can guess. God has His instruments of vengeance on those who bring wickedness into places that have been holy. Dark and mysterious are His ways.”

Now what I should-have thought of such a story if it had been told me in London I can easily imagine. There was such an obvious explanation: the man in question had been a drunkard, what wonder if the demons of delirium pursued him? But here in Polearn it was different.

“And who is in the quarry-house now?” I asked. “Years ago the fisher-boys told me the story of the man who first built it and of his horrible end. And now again it has happened. Surely no one has ventured to inhabit it once more?”

I saw in her face, even before I asked that question, that somebody had done so.

“Yes, it is lived in again,” said she, “for there is no end to the blindness… I don’t know if you remember him. He was tenant of the vicarage many years ago.”

“John Evans,” said I.

“Yes. Such a nice fellow he was too. Your uncle was pleased to get so good a tenant. And now— She rose.

“Aunt Hester, you shouldn’t leave your sentences unfinished,” I said.

She shook her head.

“My dear, that sentence will finish itself,” she said. “But what a time of night! I must go to bed, and you too, or they will think we have to keep lights burning here through the dark hours.”

Before getting into bed I drew my curtains wide and opened all the windows to the warm tide of the sea air that flowed softly in. Looking out into the garden I could see in the moonlight the roof of the shelter, in which for three years I had lived, gleaming with dew. That, as much as anything, brought back the old days to which I had now returned, and they seemed of one piece with the present, as if no gap of more than twenty years sundered them. The two flowed into one.like globules of mercury uniting into a softly shining globe, of mysterious lights and reflections.

Then, raising my eyes a little, I saw against the black hill-side the windows of the quarry-house still alight.

Morning, as is so often the case, brought no shattering of my illusion. As I began to regain consciousness, I fancied that I was a boy again waking up in the shelter in the garden, and though, as I grew more widely awake, I smiled at the impression, that on which it was based I found to be indeed true. It was sufficient now as then to be here, to wander again on the cliffs, and hear the popping of the ripened seed-pods on the gorse-bushes; to stray along the shore to the bathing-cove, to float and drift and swim in the warm tide, and bask on the sand, and watch the gulls fishing, to lounge on the pier-head with the fisher-folk, to see in their eyes and hear in their quiet speech the evidence of secret things not so much known to them as part of their instincts and their very being. There were powers and presences about me; the white poplars that stood by the stream that babbled down the valley knew of them, and showed a glimpse of their knowledge sometimes, like the gleam of their white underleaves; the very cobbles that paved the street were soaked in it All that I wanted was to lie there and grow soaked in it too; unconsciously, as a boy, I had done that, but now the process must be conscious. I must know what stir of forces, fruitful and mysterious, seethed along the hill-side at noon, and sparkled at night on the sea. They could be known, they could even be controlled by those who were masters of the spell, but never could they be spoken of, for they were dwellers in the innermost, grafted into the eternal life of the world. There were dark secrets as well as these clear, kindly powers, and to these no doubt belonged the negotium perambulans in tenebris which, though of deadly malignity, might be regarded not only as evil, but as the avenger of sacrilegious and impious deeds… All this was part of the spell of Polearn, of which the seeds had long lain dormant in me. But now they were sprouting, and who knew what strange flower would unfold on their stems?p

It was not long before I came across John Evans. One morning, as I lay on the beach, there came shambling across the sand a man stout and middle-aged with the face of Silenus. He paused as he drew near and regarded me from narrow eyes.

“Why, you’re the little chap that used to live in the parson’s garden,” he said. “Don’t you recognise me?”

I saw who it was when he spoke: his voice, I think, instructed me, and recognising it, I could see the features of the strong, alert young man in this gross caricature.

“Yes, you’re John Evans,” I said. “You used to be very kind to me: you used to draw pictures for me.”

“So I did, and I’ll draw you some more. Been bathing? That’s a risky performance. You never know what lives in the sea, nor what lives on the land for that matter. Not that I heed them.

I stick to work and whisky. God! I’ve learned to paint since I saw you, and drink too for that matter. I live in the quarry-house, you know, and it’s a powerful thirsty place. Come and have a look at my things if you’re passing. Staying with your aunt, are you? I could do a wonderful portrait of her. Interesting face; she knows a lot. People who live at Polearn get to know a lot, though I don’t take much stock in that sort of knowledge myself.”

I do not know when I have been at once so repelled and interested. Behind the mere grossness of his face there lurked something which, while it appalled, yet fascinated me. His thick lisping speech had the same quality. And his paintings, what would they be like? …

“I was just going home,” I said. “I’ll gladly come in, if you’ll allow me.”

He took me through the untended and overgrown garden into the house which I had never yet.entered. A great grey cat was sunning itself in the window, and an old woman was laying lunch in a corner of the cool hall into which the door opened. It was built of stone, and the carved mouldings let into the walls, the fragments of gargoyles and sculptured images, bore testimony to the truth of its having been built out of the demolished church. In one corner was an oblong and carved wooden table littered with a painter’s apparatus and stacks of canvases leaned against the walls.

He jerked his thumb towards a head of an angel that was built into the mantelpiece and giggled.

“Quite a sanctified air,” he said, “so we tone it down for the purposes of ordinary life by a different sort of art. Have a drink? No? Well, turn over some of my pictures while I put myself to rights.”

He was justified in his own estimate of his skill: he could paint (and apparently he could paint anything), but never have I seen pictures so inexplicably hellish. There were exquisite studies of trees, and you knew that something lurked in the flickering shadows. There was a drawing of his cat sunning itself in the window, even as I had just now seen it, and yet it was no cat but some beast of awful malignity. There was a boy stretched naked on the sands, not human, but some evil thing which had come out of the sea. Above all there were pictures of his garden overgrown and jungle-like, and you knew that in the bushes were presences ready to spring out on you …

“Well, do you like my style?” he said as he came up, glass in hand. (The tumbler of spirits that he held had not been diluted.) “I try to paint the essence of what I see, not the mere husk and skin of it, but its nature, where it comes from and what gave it birth. There’s much in common between a cat and a fuchsia-bush if you look at them closely enough. Everything came out of the slime of the pit, and it’s all going back there. I should like to do a picture of you some day. I’d hold the mirror up to Nature, as that old lunatic said.”

After this first meeting I saw him occasionally throughout the months of that wonderful summer. Often he kept to his house and to his painting for days together, and then perhaps some evening I would find him lounging on the pier, always alone, and every time we met thus the repulsion and interest grew, for every time he seemed to have gone farther along a path of secret knowledge towards some evil shrine where complete initiation awaited him… And then suddenly the end came.

I had met him thus one evening on the cliffs while the October sunset still burned in the sky, but over it with amazing rapidity there spread from the west a great blackness of cloud such as I have never seen for denseness. The light was sucked from the sky, the dusk fell in ever thicker layers. He suddenly became conscious of this.

“I must get back as quick as I can,” he said. “It will be dark in a few minutes, and my servant is out. The lamps will not be lit.”

He stepped out with extraordinary briskness for one who shambled and could scarcely lift his feet, and soon broke out into a stumbling run. In the gathering darkness I could see that his face was moist with the dew of some unspoken terror.

“You must come with me,” he panted, “for so we shall get the lights burning the sooner. I cannot do without light.”

I had to exert myself to the full to keep up with him, for terror winged him, and even so I fell behind, so that when I came to the garden gate, he was already half-way up the path to the house.

I saw him enter, leaving the door wide, and found him fumbling with matches. But his hand so trembled that he could not transfer the light to the wick of the lamp..”But what’s the hurry about?” I asked.

Suddenly his eyes focused themselves on the open door behind me, and he jumped from his seat beside the table which had once been the altar of God, with a gasp and a scream.

“No, no!” he cried. “Keep it off! …”

I turned and saw what he had seen. The Thing had entered and now was swiftly sliding across the floor towards him, like some gigantic caterpillar. A stale phosphorescent light came from it, for though the dusk had grown to blackness outside, I could see it quite distinctly in the awful light of its own presence. From it too there came an odour of corruption and decay, as from slime that has long lain below water. It seemed to have no head, but on the front of it was an orifice of puckered skin which opened and shut and slavered at the edges. It was hairless, and slug-like in shape and in texture. As it advanced its fore-part reared itself from the ground, like a snake about to strike, and it fastened on him …

At that sight, and with the yells of his agony in my ears, the panic which had struck me relaxed into a hopeless courage, and with palsied, impotent hands I tried to lay hold of the Thing.

But I could not: though something material was there, it was impossible to grasp it; my hands sunk in it as in thick mud. It was like wrestling with a nightmare.

I think that but a few seconds elapsed before all was over. The screams of the wretched man sank to moans and mutterings as the Thing fell on him: he panted once or twice and was still. For a moment longer there came gurglings and sucking noises, and then it slid out even as it had entered. I lit the lamp which he had fumbled with, and there on the floor he lay, no more than a rind of skin in loose folds over projecting bones.