In Salisbury, years ago, I set out on something very like a video game sidequest: to access the tomb of Lord Someone-or-Other, beheaded by Richard the Somethingth. The grave sat behind a high brick wall and a locked iron gate, in a forgotten cemetery off a side street. From city hall I learned that the key was in the keeping of a church on the other side of town, where I claimed to be a long-lost American descendent of the Someone-or-Other family in order to get hold of it. In retrospect the deception might not have been necessary, but I wasn’t positive that they would be receptive if I told them that my main reason for wanting to access the tomb was that I’d heard it was haunted. The key was a hand-sized metal thing, patinaed and heavy, that only reluctantly turned in the rusted lock. Beyond the gate was a ruined burial ground. The grass had grown to knee height and buzzed with insects under the June sun. If there were graves at ground level I couldn’t see them, but a handful of stone tombs pushed their way above the overgrowth and sat crumbling. Some were riven by great cracks; most of the inscriptions were all but illegible.
Only rarely have I come across a truly abandoned graveyard in the States, and then always at the edges of human habitation — in the forest, in the desert. In Britain, by contrast, they seemed to be everywhere. Fenced- or walled-off dumping grounds for the old dead crouched in the middle of bustling tourist towns, left to fester. In Oxford I was led to a prime example of the genre, where homeless people encamped under the porch of what might once have been the careta
ker’s lodge and something large and furred loped away from me through the tall grass. There were few trails through the tangle, and when the evening church balls rang out it was hard not to imagine shapeless things crawling from the riven ground by night.
This, exactly this — cemetaries, once sacred, now abject and decaying due to the negligence of the living — is the subject of one of Robert Aickman’s best crafted and least known stories, “Residents Only,” collected in the 2016 collection Compulsory Games from the NYRB. Aickman never went in much for plot, or for that matter character; they’re rather meditations on strange scenes and dreadful atmospheres that rarely if ever add up to an entirely coherent picture. As I wrote a while back for another publication:
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