‘The Swords’ by Robert Aickman

It’s as if Aickman thought, “Where’s the least spooky place on earth?” and took Wolverhampton as a challenge.

I could have included any number of Aickman stories here, having first read Cold Hand in Mine as a student 25 years ago and feeling as if I’d been initiated into a cult. He’s having a well-deserved moment now, on a similar trajectory to H.P. Lovecraft. Aickman’s great power is in recording how nightmares feel, in drab contemporary settings, and refusing ever to explain what is going on.

Here, we get a lonely young commercial traveller eager to lose his virginity. Wandering the streets of Wolvo, avoiding the miserable boarding house the firm has dumped him in, he finds a fairground on a bombsite. There’s a grotty tent with a seedy show in which men first stab then kiss a pretty girl, who is also available for private shows to respectable men like him. Over tea and pies in a cafe, he gives into temptation, and agrees to bring her back to the boarding house after dark. But his first time with a woman doesn’t go quite as planned.

First published in The Fifth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories, ed. Robert Aickman, 1969. Collected in Cold Hand in Mine, 1975