‘Three Miles Up’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard

A very Aickman-esque tale. I’ve heard it suggested that Aickman actually wrote this story when he and Howard were in a relationship together, which seems like a misogynistic viewpoint. It could be that this is Howard trying to out-Aickman Robert Aickman. Whatever, this is an extraordinary story with just the right amount of weirdness and ambiguity to leave the reader haunted and having to come up with their own conclusions.

‘Three Miles Up’ concerns two friends, John and Clifford, as they embark on a barging holiday. Following a furious row they pick up a mysterious but friendly young woman called Sharon. We realise something is not right about Sharon because when John and Clifford speak to a small boy who’s watching them from a tow path, she emerges from the cabin and the boy gives “a sudden little shriek of fear…and turned to run down the bank the way they had come.” Whatever spell Sharon has cast over John and Clifford to veil her true self, the boy obviously sees her for what she is. After they encounter a turning on the canal not shown on their map, which Sharon gently encourages them to take, they soon discover that they’ve made a terrible mistake.

First published in We are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories (a collaboration with Robert Aickman), Jonathan Cape, 1951. Collected in Mr. Wrong, Jonathan Cape, 1975 – more latterly Picador, 2015 – and in Three Miles Up and Other Strange Stories, Tartarus Press, 2003

‘Three Miles Up’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard

This story first appeared in a shared collection with three early stories by Robert Aickman and is similar in style and mood to his work. Like Aickman, Howard insists on her nightmare horrors taking place in recognisably modern settings, without distancing Victoriana and cosy gaslight.

‘Three Miles Up’, like Aickman’s ‘The Trains’ from the same collection, starts with a relatable real-world horror: you’ve agreed to go on holiday with a friend only to realise that perhaps you don’t get along quite as well as you’d imagined. Here, it’s two chaps exploring Britain’s neglected canals on a narrowboat, snapping at each other and bickering. Then they come upon a young woman sleeping on the bank and convince her to join them, hoping her presence might change the dynamic.

She’s a prototypical manic pixie dream girl, I suppose, except in British mythology pixies are famous for tricking travellers and leading them to their doom:

“To the left was the straight cut which involved the longer journey originally planned; and curving away to the right was the short arm which John advocated. The canal was fringed with rushes, and there was one small cottage with no light in it. Clifford went into the cabin to tell Sharon where they were, and then, as they drifted slowly in the middle of the junction, John suddenly shouted: ‘Clifford! What’s the third turning?’”

The inconclusive ending of the story only adds to its power. Where has this third channel taken them? Have they slipped through time, or into another plane of existence? I wonder if it’s some other aspect of The Beyond from Lucio Fulci’s 1981 film of that name.

First published in We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories, 1951. Collected in Mr. Wrong, 1975

‘Three Miles Up’ by Elizabeth Jane Howard

A preoccupation I consistently notice in my own fiction is the male friendship, and specifically how sexuality influences such relationships. This story is a masterclass on the subject, and it’s worthy of René Girard’s theory of triangular desire (essentially the urge to desire what someone else desires). Two men, friends, take an argumentative trip on a canal boat. After a third person unexpectedly joins them, unsettling things begin happening, both within the men’s friendship and along their journey’s route. The story builds quietly, as many of the best ones do, into the kind of ending that may well have you gaping astern and asking, How on Earth did we get here?