THEY by Rudyard Kipling

‘“I have never seen the faces of my dead in any dream,” I answered.
“Then it must be as bad as being blind.”’

This wonderfully hidden-in-plain-sight, oblique, but not opaque, story is a blend of Walter de la Mare stories as blessed with a gentle kiss for the reader’s hand by much of the English ghost  story tradition, as its narrator loses his way in his car near the Sussex downs and finds this large house and a blind woman (“…but we blindies have only one skin, I think”) and the children in the house and grounds … and twice again the narrator does this act of getting lost there. Indeed, his car breaks down “In fifty different ways. Only mine has chosen the fifty first.”

Foiled  by events  (“It was a long afternoon crowded with mad episodes that rose and dissolved like the dust of our wheels; cross-sections of remote and incomprehensible lives through which we raced at right angles;”) in the vicinity of the house, events such as a local child’s sickness and crude business tally-sticks and even speaking the N word to make the story shrink in plain sight instead of merely hiding in it. But that takes little account of the ‘colours’ the blind woman sees.

“….distorting afresh the distorted shadows, […] She stretched out her arms to the shadows and the shadows within the shadow.”

My previous reviews of Rudyard Kipling: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/?s=Kipling&submit=Search

My reviews of all older or classic works: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/

My reviews of miscellaneous ghost stories etc: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/12/24/links-to-some-of-my-recent-reviews-of-miscellaneous-and-older-ghost-or-horror-stories/

Separate horror stories from many years ago…