Fear

Roald Dahl

FEAR

Contents

Introduction Roald Dahl

W. S. L. P. Hartley

Harry Rosemary Timperley

The Corner Shop Cynthia Asquith

In the Tube E. F. Benson

Christmas Meeting Rosemary Timperley

Elias and the Draug Jonas Lie

Playmates A. M. Burrage

Ringing the Changes Robert Aickman

The Telephone Mary Treadgold

The Ghost of a Hand J. Sheridan Le Fanu

The Sweeper A. M. Burrage (Ex-Private X)

Afterward Edith Wharton

On the Brighton Road Richard Middleton

The Upper Berth F. Marion Crawford

Acknowledgements

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PENGUIN BOOKS

FEAR

Roald Dahl is best known for his mischievous, wildly inventive stories for children. But throughout his life he was also a prolific and acclaimed writer of stories for adults. These sinister, surprising tales continue to entertain, amuse and shock generations of readers even today.

For James Kelly

Introduction

by Roald Dahl

My wise and venerable old friend Alfred Knopf, the American publisher, had a half-brother called Edwin. Edwin was a film producer in Hollywood, and a long time ago, back in 1958, I went to him with the idea that we should do a television series together of nothing but ghost stories. I pointed out that no one had done this before. I said there existed a whole world of ghost stories to choose from and that it wouldn’t be difficult to come up with a stunning batch of tales. All one needed for a series like this was twenty-four stories.

Eddie Knopf thought it over. He talked with his associates and everyone agreed that it was a splendid idea. Emlyn Williams was approached and he agreed to be the introducer of each episode. My own primary task was to search out the twenty-four super ghost stories. I was also to write the screenplay for the first one (the pilot) and for several others.

On the face of it, my job didn’t appear too onerous. In the second half of the last century and in the early part of this one, ghost stories were very much the fashion. Dickens had written one. J. M. Barrie had done several. So had Bulwer Lytton and D. K. Broster and George Eliot and Anatole France and Mrs Gaskell and Théophile Gautier and L. P. Hartley and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Hardy and Washington Irving and Henry James and Walter de la Mare and Maugham and Maupassant and Poe and Sir Walter Scott and Mark Twain and H. G. Wells and Elizabeth Bowen. Even Oscar Wilde had written one called The Canterville Ghost. Great names all of these. I looked forward very much to making my selections.

One of the first things I did was to call on Lady Cynthia Asquith who was an acknowledged expert on ghost stories and had published several anthologies. She was old and frail and she was in bed when she received me. But she was as bright as ever and gave me lots of good advice about how to start the great search.

After a tremendous amount of scuttling around, including several visits to the British Museum Library, I managed to collect just about every ghost story that had ever been written. My house was filled with books and piles of old magazines, both bought and borrowed. Then I began to read.

I got a bit of a shock. The first batch of fifty or so stories I read were so bad it was difficult to finish them. They were trivial, poorly written and not in the least spooky. Spookiness is, after all, the real purpose of the ghost story. It should give you the creeps and disturb your thoughts. The stories I was reading did none of this. Some of the worst ones were written by the most famous writers. I read on. I couldn’t believe how bad they were. Nevertheless, I carefully recorded every single story I read in a notebook and I gave each one of them marks. Most of them got nought out of ten.

Then suddenly a bright star flashed across the murky sky. I had found a good one. The end of it gave me the shivers. It was called Harry by Rosemary Timperley. That bucked me up and I went on with my labours.

I read another hundred or so bad ones. Then I found a second good one. It was The Open Door by Mrs Oliphant.

After I had read altogether some three hundred published stories, I had succeeded in discovering six good ones. That was not many, but it was anyway a beginning. The six, including the two just mentioned by Rosemary Timperley and Mrs Oliphant, were The Telephone by Mary Treadgold, Afterward by Edith Wharton, Spinsters’ Rest by Clemence Dane and The Four-Fifteen Express by Amelia B. Edwards.

Hang on a second, I thought. What was going on here? Every single one of these stories was written by a woman! What an extraordinary thing. I began to wonder whether the really good ghost story belonged solely to the female. Was she perhaps more sensitive in that small delicate area than the male? It was beginning to look like it.

With a feeling that I was perhaps making a rather remarkable literary discovery, I ploughed on. And by golly, if the next good one wasn’t also by a woman! It was Cynthia Asquith’s God Grante That She Lye Stille. I got rather excited.

But alas, the next excellent one was by a man. It was Playmates by A. M. Burrage. And what a good one it was. After that, there followed a whole group of men, L. P. Hartley, Dickens, E. F. Benson, John Collier and the rest. The men were catching up.

At the end of this marathon reading session, I counted that I had read seven hundred and forty-nine ghost stories. I was completely dazed by reading so much rubbish, but as I staggered away