Compulsory Games by Robert Aickman

Author:Robert Aickman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2018-03-29T11:35:37+00:00

WOOD

SO MY NIECE, Elinor, has given me one of those weather houses, where the woman comes out when it is likely to be fine, and the man when it is going to rain! I did not think they were made any more. There is something about them that not many people know; at least nowadays. It is this: that just as dowsing can be used to trace many things other than water (which of course makes “water divining” quite the wrong name for it), so these little weather houses, or some of them, can be attuned to foretell more things than the merely literal state of the heavens.

It is an odd story of which I am reminded by this, and until now I have not cared to make a note of it. There is always a risk of a written record coming into the wrong hands; and so perhaps reaching the eyes or ears of the people described. Moreover, I was always very uncertain how far I could depend upon my own impressions of what happened; and naturally I am even less confident now, nearly twenty years later. Also, one is superstitious about seeming to give a new life, by writing about it, to something which has frightened one. The curious business about Munn and his wife, whatever I thought about the reality of it, even at the time, certainly frightened me—so much that I was the last person to be surprised by what happened to them in the end. But old Pell and his wife are dead now too. So here goes.

I suppose that if anyone at all reads what I am writing, it is more likely than not to be a stranger. A few sentences about myself had, therefore, better come first.

I served my articles as an architect, in the days when that was how one learned a profession, by working at practical and immediate problems from the first, instead of merely listening to lectures and doing exercises; and for several years I worked as an architect’s assistant in a good office, doing well and having every prospect of starting in practice on my own. The tone was set in those days by architects such as Ernest George, and there seemed an unlimited number of costly country houses being built, pleasant work for all who had the social knack of getting it—which did not seem very difficult, as I look back on it. But then came the War, the first one, and the real one: the greatest mistake mankind ever made, in my opinion, but, curiously enough, one out of which I myself did quite well, at least in a sense. Before it was over, and to my considerable surprise, I found myself a lieutenant-colonel, though very much of the wartime kind, not the real thing, as I knew perfectly well; but then in the very last month, more or less when Wilfred Owen was killed, if I have it right, I was, not killed, but badly knocked

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