Fantasy: The 101 Best Books by Michael Moorcock & James Cawthorn

Author:Michael Moorcock & James Cawthorn [Moorcock, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781473219847
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2017-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

[1937]

52

WILLIAM SLOANE

To Walk the Night

There are authors who may not have written much but what they have written refuses to be forgotten. William Milligan Sloane, while in his early thirties, wrote two novels which hover on the borderline between sf and the occult, with a decided leaning towards the second category. One, The Edge of Running Water, is regarded as a classic. Before them, he had written two plays on supernatural themes. After them, for thirty-five years, there was silence, more or less, on the fiction front.

Which did not mean that he had lost contact. Writing was a secondary profession, a change of pace in the middle of a continuing career in publishing. In 1954 he edited two anthologies of sf, Space, Space, Space and Stories for Tomorrow. Whatever the impulse or influence which sparked off his burst of literary creativity, it was never repeated. Regrettably, because Night need not concede any points to its more celebrated stablemate. Both titles were included in The Rim of the Morning (1964); Edge had been filmed as The Devil Commands in 1941, as a Boris Karloff vehicle. Night had the potential for an occult thriller in the manner of Jacques Tourneur, but the chance has been lost; it commits the sin of placing some value upon human life and so has nothing to offer an industry trafficking in blood and bile.

It begins with a foreword in traditional style by the narrator, Berkeley ‘Bark’ Jones, doubting the wisdom of revealing the facts to the world. Jones has returned to the home of Lister, his foster-father, bearing the ashes of Lister’s son, Jerry. He is afraid to tell the whole truth about Jerry’s death, for his own and Lister’s sake, but the older man’s influence persuades him.

Two years before, while revisiting their old college, a mildly drunk Bark and Jerry decided to call in on LeNormand, the faculty’s brilliant astronomer-mathematician. He had once published a highly controversial critique of Einstein’s work, which was greatly admired by Jerry but outside the grasp of Bark. LeNormand retreated from the controversy, saying that it had become ‘dangerous’. He never explained the nature of the threat.

When the two enter the observatory, he is in a chair facing the door, his body wreathed in white fire. For a second, he seems to be alive. They smother the flames with their coats and an extinguisher, but too late. During the police investigation, which reveals that the burns are of abnormal severity, they are startled to hear that the reclusive astronomer had been married for three months. A meeting with Selena, his widow, leaves Bark more puzzled than before, and worried about Jerry’s reaction to her.

She has a remote, almost unhuman, beauty and a statuesque body, yet her clothes are dowdy and ill-fitting. Her precise and formal speech adds to the unsettling effect. Jerry doesn’t share his friend’s unease; he is intrigued and attracted by Selena, who seems to reciprocate his interest. His second mistake is to preserve the mathematical formulae upon which LeNormand had been working.

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