'The Same Dog' in Cold Hand in Mine

"Faber & Faber reissued most of Aickman’s stories a few years back, and they are all worth reading – although there are a couple of vampire ones in there, and I find vampires very dull! Aickman is, rightly, lauded, although he was forgotten for a while. The introduction to this edition is by Reece Shearsmith, from The League of Gentlemen . Aickman is very dear to The League of Gentlemen , you can see that; they both deal in sort of uniquely English nightmares. Aickman’s got a very precise, polite way of writing. I mean, he’s funny as well, but he’s quite snobbish, too. Despite that precision, at the heart of his best stories is something unresolved and unpleasant. ‘The Same Dog’ is the best of all. It doesn’t admit of an easy interpretation. Yes, that very much applies to ‘The Same Dog’. It’s about Hilary Brigstock, a boy from a long line of boys. His mother’s dead, so he’s got his father and two much older brothers, who bully him. There’s no female presence in his life. He goes to some sort of prep school – because this is Robert Aickman – and there he meets Mary Rossiter. Immediately, they have a connection. She’s slightly older than him and, although there’s no doubt that they love each other, they’re just friends. I don’t think you read about that often enough in literature: close male-female friendships. They’re really close friends, this relationship is everything to Hilary. And he loses her halfway through, which is heartbreaking. And they see a dog there. They see a horrible dog that they don’t like. It looks diseased. At one point Aickman calls it “blotchy and draggled”. It’s not a pleasant dog. The dog seems to have a weird connection with Mary. Spooked, they leave the house. As they walk away from this ruined house, Hilary turns around, and for half a second, he sees a man – a bald, slender man – rising up from behind the wall. And it’s implied that the man is naked – which is another weird detail, strangely sexual. But Hilary doesn’t ever reveal this detail to anybody else. They go home, and afterwards, Hilary never sees Mary again. Well, no, not everything, that’s the thing. Like all good ghost stories, you can read it in any number of ways. Either reality has fundamentally shifted, which we know is impossible, or possibly it’s a screen memory for some awful event that happened to them, that they can’t quite recall. One of them could have been molested. That’s sort of implied, but also isn’t. Objectively, none of the story makes any sense, and as such feels like the kind of thing that you wouldn’t tell people about if it happened to you, because it would drive you mad if you even acknowledged its reality. And the story’s just so powerful for that. I love that it’s a sum that doesn’t add up. It doesn’t make sense unless you consider something absolutely beyond normal cognition. I think that’s such an achievement when it’s told so naturalistically. It’s not strictly a ghost story. It has the logic and the mechanics of a ghost story, but technically there’s no ghost. I think it’s intrinsic to certain kinds of ghost stories, which are a different discipline to horror stories. With ghost stories, there’s more of an opportunity to explore the mind. To explore people’s relationship with death. Because ghosts are liminal creatures. It’s not like horror, with a giant spider, or something clearly not of our world, like Stephen King’s It. That’s a different thing to the ghost story where ghosts occupy this weird space in our real lives. In daylight, we all know they don’t exist… but we’ve all stayed somewhere we didn’t like. We all know someone who’s experienced something weird. So it’s at the borders of what we understand to be real. It makes for a more interesting story, one that could conceivably happen in our world."