“Church-Peveril is a house so beset and frequented by spectres, both visible and audible, that none of the family which it shelters under its acre and a half of green copper roofs takes psychical phenomena with any seriousness.”
The short stories of E. F. Benson are replete with haunted houses, hotels, villas and assorted other structures, but none start with this sort of deceptive dismissal of the seriousness of the situation. The Peveril family has been dealing with apparitions for so long that the ghosts have become almost mundane. And yet, as it turns out, this house features two of the most memorably malevolent and dangerous ghosts in Benson’s entire canon. It just so happens that they confine themselves to the long gallery and become a nuisance only under certain conditions. Those conditions are about to be met, but this time everything will be different afterwards.
“Just room for one inside, sir.”
Arguably the single most famous line from any short story written by Benson is this one. It is spoken twice; once within a dream-like premonition of a man’s own death and then later in the real world as a warning to avoid certain death. The line was refashioned just slightly to become “Room for one more” in a famous Twilight Zone episode loosely adapted from Benson’s original.
“There's no such thing as Time really; it has no actual existence. Time is nothing more than an infinitesimal point in eternity, just as space is an infinitesimal point in infinity. At the most, Time is a sort of tunnel through which we are accustomed to believe that we are travelling.”
The story eventually unfolds from this unusual beginning is one of paradox. How can one man witness another in the train station one night and learn that he only just shortly arrived in town before when he meets him later? “In the Tube” is something of an anomaly in the oeuvre of Benson who generally worked almost exclusively within the genre of horror in his short fiction rather than expanding into science fiction and fantasy. Not just the generic conventions, but the entire structure and population of the story is notably out of step with the template from which Benson preferred to work.
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.
The creature thus described here is not peculiar to just this story. Several of Benson’s stories feature a slug-like creature similar to that described here; it is the author’s contribution to the mythos of the Elemental. They slugs are not always described exactly the same and do not manifest in exactly the same way, but they represent an evil that is…elemental. That goes beyond the norm. That is a pure wickedness perhaps not of our world.
Naturally, now that he was a genuine spirit, he did not want to be mixed up in fraudulent mediumship, for he felt that such a thing would seriously compromise him on the other side, where, probably, it was widely known that Mrs. Cumberbatch was a person to be avoided. But, on the other hand, having so soon found a medium through whom he could communicate with his friends, it was hard to take a high moral view, and say that he would have nothing whatever to do with her.
Mr. Tilly had been a true believer in the power of Mrs. Cumberbatch to make contact with the dead. Her séances were renowned and respected within the world of Spiritualists who truly believed. And then Mr. Tilly goes and gets killed and his next visit to Mrs. Cumberbatch is vexing. On the one hand, he knows for a fact that she is genuine because he has been able to communicate with her. At the same time, to make her séances a success, she also resorts to trickery and fraud to convince those in attendance of her abilities. What a quandary for a spirit to be in. This story reveals that the world of weird is real in the story of Benson. There is no trickery and there are no rational explanations to explain the supernatural. The world of those who want others to believe in the reality of that world, however, are very often presented as less than honorable.
There must have been hundreds of them, for they formed a sort of writhing, crawling pyramid on the bed. Occasionally one fell off on to the floor, with a soft fleshy thud, and though the floor was of hard concrete, it yielded to the pincerfeet as if it had been putty, and, crawling back, the caterpillar would mount on to the bed again, to rejoin its fearful companions. They appeared to have no faces, so to speak, but at one end of them there was a mouth that opened sideways in respiration.
Then, as I looked, it seemed to me as if they all suddenly became conscious of my presence.
Obviously, the title characters of this horrific story are at least distant cousins to that big slug described above. The description of this quite unusual breed of caterpillars is one of the most disturbing things that Benson ever wrote. The single sentence set off on its own as a full paragraph unto itself is arguably the single most frightening thing he ever wrote; utterly chilling in its understated portrayal of terror.
