Aickman’s 1985 story is of a travelling salesman who becomes lost on his drive home, because he was cajoled into following alternative directions that were supposedly a short-cut. Upon realising he is lost, and that he will soon be out of petrol, he turns off the road towards a place that offers “good fare and some accommodation”.
The unavailability of the full facts, and the promise of weirdness to come, is evident from the start. The location is “somewhere at the back of beyond”, which has a Brothers Grimm ‘once upon a time’ ring to it. There is the brief possibility of normality, with a sign promising accommodation and food and a driveway lined with rhododendrons, but Maybury has approached from a secondary entrance, a battered concrete drive and a general air of farmyard (even a shambles?) about it; the slippage—already signalled by naming the hotel The Hospice—between apparent normality and actual strangeness has started.
The hospice acts as a sort of weird digestive system: there is an obscene weightiness about the food, which Maybury can’t identify, and which ultimately defeats him, and the bullying, infantilising attitude of the staff means Maybury is uneasy about having to send it back uneaten. He has been consumed by the hospice, his preference or requirements become irrelevant inconveniences (they are not, in fact, accommodated at all), though he fares better than some, as a number of other inhabitants have been shackled to the floor of the dining-room. At the same time, he remains ‘outside’ every situation he encounters in the hospice, not quite caught up with, or dominated by, the institution and its inhabitants, unlike Bannard and Cécile who cannot do without it.
Aickman used as an epigraph to his Cold Hand in Mine collection a quotation from Sacheverell Sitwell: “In the end it is the mystery that lasts and not the explanation.” The ‘meaning’ of the story, if there is one, is not easy to determine, and there is a sense that there are too many complex interactions not only that the reader is not aware of, but that are interactions of things she may not know exist, or may not have the right words to identify, let alone describe. The horror Maybury feels is not in response to something that happens—the defeating pile of terrible food, the dead, possibly murdered, corpse—but is rather the horror experienced by those keeping their eyes tightly shut in the dark that is not quite silent enough.
First published in Cold Hand in Mine, Victor Gollancz 1975, reprinted by Faber 2014
A Personal Anthology 