Kirk believed in ghosts. He believed in people who believed in ghosts. He believed in people who believed in the stories of ghosts. Whether ghosts were objective or subjective phenomena, whether they were forces of the universe or of the human imagination, he would not definitively say. “Can we imagine a human soul operating without a body?,” he said at the end of his life. “You and I are just a collection of some electrical particles, held in suspension temporarily. We aren’t really solid at all. Can there be a collection of such particles in a different form that can occasionally manifest itself? Nobody knows.”
The idea for this new reissue of Old House of Fear came out of a symposium called “Permanent Things: Russell Kirk’s centenary,” hosted by The New Criterion in the fall of 2018. Versions of those presentations were published in the January 2019 issue of the magazine. As a presenter on “The Ghost of Russell Kirk,” I am grateful to the other panelists for adding their insights into the life and work of Dr. Kirk: Brian C. Anderson, T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., Mark Henrie, Roger Kimball, Daniel J. Mahoney, Daniel McCarthy, Jeffrey O. Nelson, James Piereson, Jeffrey Polet, R. R. Reno, and Gerald Russello. One thing we realized is that not nearly enough of Kirk’s writing is in present circulation. With this new edition of Old House of Fear, we hope to begin to balance that unfortunate deficit.
It was also remarked upon, but unplanned by us organizers, that the day we came together – October 19, 2018 – happened to be the hundredth anniversary to the day of Kirk’s birth. On that centenary, if we managed to conjure his legacy, then we also summoned a revenant spirit. As between fiction and fact, subjective belief and objective existence were fluid dynamics in Kirk’s mind. Kirk believed in the life of the dead. He believed in the afterlife of the soul and the soul imbued in the living spirit of the culture. His beliefs still haunt us, just as they haunt the gothic landscape of Old House of Fear.
JAMES PANERO
Old House of Fear
This Gothick tale, in unblushing line of direct descent from The Castle of Otranto, I do inscribe to Abigail Fay.
Chapter 1
ON THIS SHROUDED NIGHT, five men tossed in a boat off the island of Carnglass, where the sea never is smooth. So thick about them hung the fog that they could not see the great cliffs. Knowing, though, every rock and reef, they sensed where the island lay.
Of a sudden, a tall flame shot up from Carnglass, fierce and unnatural. Across the swell there came to the men in the boat the crash of some explosion. Clinging to their oars, they stared silent toward the land; the oldest man crossed himself. The flame, surging and waving for some minutes, soon sank lower. In a little while they heard faint distant sounds, several of them, like gunshots. The younger men looked to the old helmsman, who pulled hesitantly at his white beard.
Then he signed to them to put the boat about. Glancing fearfully at the distant flame as they heaved, two men hauled at the sail. In a minute they had changed course, and the fire in the night glowed at their backs as they pulled away from the uneasy neighborhood of silent and invisible Carnglass.
Three thousand miles away, two men sat in a handsome office. “That’s our island,” Duncan MacAskival said: “Carnglass.”
Across the Ordnance Survey map his thick forefinger moved to a ragged and twisted little outline, away at the verge of the Hebrides, which even upon the linen of the map seemed to recoil from the Atlantic combers. “The tattered top of a drowned mountain. And that’s the castle, by the bay to the West, Hugh: Old House of Fear. I like the names. You’re to buy Carnglass for me, cliffs and clachans and deer-forest and Old House and all; and price is no object.”
Hugh Logan smiled at the heavy old man in the swivel chair. “Why send me to the Western Isles to haggle for a speck of rock I know nothing about, Mr. MacAskival? Why do you need Carnglass? And why not have a Glasgow solicitor do the business for you? I’d enjoy the trip, right enough, but I don’t need to tell you that my time costs you bona fide money. Any junior clerk could buy an island for you.”
“Look out there, Hugh.” MacAskival swung round his chair to the big window at the back of his teak-panelled office. Far below, stretching eastward for a quarter of a mile along the river, the stacks and coke-ovens and corrugated-iron roofs of MacAskival Iron Works sent up to heaven their smoke and flame and thunder. “Look at it all. I made it. And what has it given me? Two coronary fits. I’m told to rest. But where could a man like me fade decently? I’m not made for quiet desperation. There’s just one place, Hugh, where I might lie quiet; and that’s Carnglass.”
MacAskival peered at his map. “I haven’t seen Carnglass,” he went on, “except in pictures, and no more did my father, or his father. But the MacAskivals came out of Carnglass to Nova Scotia in 1780, and they didn’t forget the little croft below Cailleach – that’s the sharp hill north of the Old House, Hugh. Their Nova Scotia farm was sand and stumps, and yet not so barren as that Carnglass croft. Still, they’d have traded ten farms in Nova Scotia for that wet little plot in Carnglass. And after two strokes, I think I’d give the mills and all for that croft – with the island thrown in.”
Logan had walked to the window, and now stood looking toward the glare of the coke-ovens; the flames went up hotly into the Michigan twilight, that April evening, and the incandescent masses of coal fell roaring. “Why, I think we might make a better bargain than that, Mr. MacAskival. Peat bogs and tumbledown castles go cheap nowadays. But why do you mean to send a man like me to buy you a few square miles of dripping misery?”
“Cigar, Hugh?” MacAskival pushed a box toward him. “The doctor says I can have just one of these a day. Well, I’m not so crazy as I seem, and you know it. Under your veneer, you’re like me – sentimental as a sick old ironmaster. Don’t tell me you’ve never thought of having an island all to yourself. So I’d like to see you hunt this dream of mine; you work too hard for your age. ‘Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’ I don’t plan to bare my bosom to the moon in Carnglass, but it should do you good to play at being a pagan suckled in a creed outworn – for a few days, anyhow.”
Old Duncan MacAskival was a trifle vain of his quotations and allusions, Logan thought. But Logan liked Mac-Askival, a self-made man, a good deal better than the average product of the big business-administration schools. It came to Logan that he, Hugh Logan, rapidly was growing into an old man’s young man. It had been more than a dozen years since he had led a battalion in Okinawa. He knew much of Scotland, born in Edinburgh as he had been, though his parents had taken him to America when he was nine; and he had gone back to take a degree at Edinburgh University. A slackening of pace, for a week or two, might do no mischief. All his life he had hurried: schools, the university, the war, and the firm: in too much of a hurry, either side of the water, to laugh, to marry, or even to dream. “No Mr. MacAskival,” Logan said, “I’m not the man to laugh at you. But you’re a canny Scot, though five generations removed. Do you need to pay my price just to draw up a deed to an island?”
“You’re more of a Scot than I am, Hugh, though you look American enough nowadays.” MacAskival leant back in his heavy chair. “Well, yes, you’ll be worth your price in this business. You know something of Scots law and tenures. And you can wheedle odd customers; Lady MacAskival is one of that breed, they tell me. Here, look at yourself in that mirror.” MacAskival nodded toward the baroque glass against the teak panelling.
Logan saw reflected a mild-seeming, amiable face – or so most people would call it, probably – almost unlined; still a young man’s face. Sometimes, when he had been a major of infantry, that face had tended to mislead people, and then Logan had to rectify impressions. He had a spare body. “Do I look like a fool?” he asked MacAskival.
“Not exactly a fool, boy, but close enough. You’re innocent: that’s the word, Hugh. What a face to set before a jury – or a crazy old creature like Lady MacAskival! Anyone