Tales Accursed: A Folk Horror Anthology

by Richard Wells

The pervading sense of loneliness made it a scene not unsuited for a wild and unearthly story.

It is a land tortured by the sea, scourged by the sea-wind. A myriad lochs, fiords, inlets, passages, serrate its broken frontiers. Innumerable islets and reefs, fanged like ravenous wolves, sentinel every shallow, lurk in every strait.

But in spite of myself the landscape began to take me in thrall and crush me. The silent vanished peoples of the hills seemed to be stirring; dark primeval faces seemed to stare at me from behind boulders and jags of rock. The place was so still, so free from the cheerful clamour of nesting birds, that it seemed a temenos sacred to some old-world god.

temenos is my new vocab word of the day

It seemed to me for the moment a land of death, where the tongues of the dead cried aloud for recognition.

Inked-out sentences in a letter were always enticing. He wondered what it was that had to be so very carefully obliterated.

But, still, the root of all religions lies about what we – in connection with our own beliefs – call ‘faith’ and – in connection with other people’s beliefs – ‘delusion’. It is all one and the same thing: all superstition, or the supposition regarding things which must for ever remain outside our exact understanding.

She honestly believed her husband – that big, hearty animal, slow-thinking, obtuse and a trifle bumptious, with all the dominant instincts of the old English squire – seignorial rights and all – to be something of a genius, fretting continually against the petty demands on his time, which, as she took it, were almost akin to the robbing of posterity.

why aren't more people reading elinor mordaunt? i'm loving this story so far

And yet by their very openness, by the fierceness of their flame, less fearful than these creatures of smouldering, silent passions, of deeply buried loves and hates, among whom her new life was cast.

Your true rustic is suckled on spells, incarnations and superstitions. The worship of Odin and Thor is somewhere deep ingrained in his nature. The strange influence of the moon, the portents which are to be found in the movements of animals, the sacred influence of the quicken, or bunch of ash keys, the power which lies in the three names of Jehovah, Alpha and Omega, written upon a fair sheet of paper and sealed with red wax.

The country woman turns her money in her pocket when she hears the cuckoo for the first time, when she sees the new moon. The town woman goes her way untouched, laughs or shudders at the superstitions which are an integral part of the everyday life of a shepherd or plough-herd.

There was no undergrowth whatever below them, the ground was spread thick and smooth with fallen pine needles, and with the tree trunks rising straight and column-like and that thick roof of branches above, the place looked like some great hall of nature’s building. No whisper of wind moved overhead, and so dark and still was it that you might easily have conceived yourself to be walking up the aisle of some walled-in place. The smell of the firs was thick in the air like incense, and the foot went noiselessly as over spread carpets. No birds flitted between the tree trunks or called to each other, the only noise was the murmurous buzz of flies, which sounded like some long-held organ note.