THE DEEP ONES: "The Night Wire" by H. F. Arnold

"The Night Wire" by H. F. Arnold

Discussion begins on April 17, 2019.

First published the September 1926 issue of Weird Tales.



ONLINE VERSIONS

http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/10/the-night-wire/
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Night_Wire

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?86054

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
The Big Book of Ghost Stories
Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural

MISCELLANY

https://tellersofweirdtales.blogspot.com/2018/12/hf-arnold-1902-1963.html
https://tinyurl.com/yysshgz5

The first selection I'll read from my newly-acquired copy of the VanderMeer's compendium. Ironic, then, that it's also in Kaye's Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, which I've had for ages now.

I thought that WT cover looked familiar, and upon some investigation it turns out this issue also saw the first publication of Lovecraft’s “He”.

I appreciated this story even more on the second reading.

It uses a relatively new technology for the time, radio, but it also works well in our media age where our virtual neighbors can be thousands of miles away. I can almost imagine a rewrite with mysterious video feeds from an IP address that doesn’t exist.

I also like the cynical asides that mostly what one hears on the wires are tales of disaster and death, suitable foreshadowing for the tale.
Arnold’s whole tale is full of questions.
Did Morgan have to die to become sort of a zombie amanuensis? Did the message itself kill him? Is what’s happening in Xebico really wonderful transfigurations or predations or possession? (I’m assuming that the transmissions aren’t a hoax). Are we hearing about the return of the dead? (The fog starts in a churchyard above graves. The whistling wind could be from subterranean origins. The smell is associated with the dead.) What are those undescribed figures standing over the fallen of Xebico? Aliens? The resurrected dead? Spiritual beings?

Not only a nice use of radio transmission for the story, but for whatever reason I began imagining the tale itself to be a radio program, along the lines of The Shadow or X Minus One. (Unfortunately this sense of melodrama did detract from the menace of the story, but that's my own doing.)

The question about Morgan is quite interesting. The reader is told early on that Morgan has a high work-rate but is wholly unimaginative: presumably that rules out any prank on his part, in which he commits suicide or knows himself to be close to death for some reason and tries to make the event worthy of the late-night news feeds he creates.

I wonder whether what's happening in Xebico isn't unusual or specific to Morgan. Perhaps we all receive this transmission when we die, and the novelty here is that Morgan transcribes it for others to read.

Morgan did not move, and the only sound in the room was the tap‐tap of the sounders. It was ominous, nerve‐racking.

Is the implication here that the "sounders" are sending Morse messages? I don't get it, Arnold could easily have used the term teletype or specify that Morgan would be translating from Morse, and doesn't. It's also a bit odd that he uses the term "sounders" and not speakers. Perhaps teletype is more efficient than reading a story into the wire and having someone transcribe that.

Teletype would make sense, too, in that the narrator-manager couldn't understand the stories directly from the radio but had to wait for Morgan to type out the stories first. It further implies, however, that Morgan isn't getting the transmission cranially: surely the narrator would notice the second wire was not actually operating, yet he specifies that "I noticed he had opened up the other wire and was using both typewriters. I thought it was a little unusual, as there was nothing very ‘hot’ coming in."

I enjoyed the lonely, wee-hours setting. The story itself raises many more questions than it answers. For example, you simultaneously have the writhing figures formed by the fog who are apparently eating the men and women of the village, along with the kaleidescopic light show in the sky, which seems to "radiate force and friendliness, almost cheeriness". Are these things in opposition to each other? Good vs. evil? Which won? Did Morgan's phantom second line act as a conduit to the fog, which the narrator mentions is forming outside his own window?

The story is highly evocative of James Herbert's novel The Fog, Stephen King's novelette, "The Mist", and John Carpenter's film, The Fog. Especially with the disappearing search parties, vaguely defined figures, and strange unearthly sounds.

Just discovered that Stephen Graham Jones wrote a story called "Xebico", which can be found online. I'll add it to the "barnstorming" thread.

http://weirdfictionreview.com/2012/10/xebico/

Got around to reading this today. I can see this appealing to Lovecraft's taste for things outside of all human experience and understanding. I rather liked it myself too.

One detailed confused me a little: the "automaton" Morgan used each typewriter with a single finger, apparently even when typing on a single one. Isn't that pointlessly inefficient? I'm a mediocre and autodidact typist myself, but I'm writing this using all of my fingers, albeit not in the "proper" way.

Perhaps the typewriters used were of a sort that doesn't support the qwerty type we're used to?

I found myself thinking about The Fog film a fair amount when reading this, and perhaps that might have caused an issue as I found Morgan being dead to be a very real possibility as soon as it was mentioned that his head was down while he was typing, so it wasn't much of a surprise. I would liked to have known what was actually going on with the fog over the town, or had more hints about that. Fogs and mists killing people aren't all that new in my horror experience, so why or how it's doing it is what catches my attention more. I felt somewhat disappointed that Morgan was just dead, and there wasn't really enough on the fog to go on but some odd being and an opposing light.

This is a very atmospheric piece. I found it highly effective. I felt the very machine-like "unimaginative" Morgan seemed almost dead already though apparently efficient. There is something darkly sardonic about him being in fact, dead. Like maybe: There's not much difference? Doing his job living or dead? Or indeed: This whole piece is told by an unreliable narrator.

The figures that emerge from the fog, one standing beside each person, one eating each. Wow. Ugh. That contrasting with the description of the light being bright and friendly and even cheerful was highly unsettling, and quite effective. There was no one way to think about what is happening which is what I think of when I think of "weird" fiction. I think of weird fiction as a shifting marker for normalcy, though a deliberate shifting. In the story, the characteristics of the sky work against what is being portrayed on earth.

This is one big creep fest, from beginning to end.

This is where words on a page leave a different impression than audio. It didn't occur to me to take "consumed" literally. I thought it metaphorical at first, like the people were being merged with the light, the light beings dominating. It's a side thought now that the beings were make of light rather than fog. Another side thought of that is a observation when I was younger, about sunlight hitting damp ground after a rainfall and fog strings will wisp up from the surface.

I had a couple thoughts about the non-existent city and the dispatch. The story mentioned that larger stations will open other lines when there's a lot of news, but Morgan opens the line himself. Not sure if that was meant as normal, but that had me thinking that possible Morgan was asleep and typing a dream and he was recording his own dispatch so to speak, before actually dying as/with the dispatcher in the fog.

A quick search on the internet, and I'm convinced the "sounders" are receiving incoming telegraph transmissions. A site I found says that operators become adept at decoding messages by ear (early machines recorded marks on paper - the dots and dashes of the incoming messages).

I re-read this from H. P. Lovecraft's Favorite Weird Tales, a book I have to thank for introducing me to Arthur Machen, M. P Sheil, and Robert W. Chambers, and in general directing the course of my reading for the past decade and a half, almost.

The pulp stories gathered at the end of the book (including this one) suffer in comparison with the foregoing classics of the Weird tale; but I saw its strengths more clearly, reading it separately from those other stories.

I was also struck by there parallels with the internet etc. (as well as reflecting that the position of learning of news from all over the globe in near real time is no longer the privilege of a relatively few professionals). The set-up, and the general air of the piece, reminded me of radio dramas of the time (or of the next decade or two, I guess).

There are maybe too many unanswered questions here for the story to be entirely satisfactory- where (and when?) is Xebico, what is the nature and origin of the fog, ditto the lights in the sky, is the narrators offered explanation of Morgan's post-mortem typing? (but on the question of Morgan's typing style, didn't I read somewhere that Lovecraft typed like that? Could touch-typing have been something
only (female) secretaries did, back then?

I've noted before that Nigel Kneale seemed to have independently discovered many Lovecraftian themes in his television work (not so much in the short story we looked at a while ago!). The consuming lights reminded me of the alien power that lures and then consumes the hippyish "Planet People" in the final Quatermass serial of 1979 (entitled The Quatermass Conclusion in its different, not just shorter, theatrical release. It was filmed with the intention of creating both TV and film versions).

Another random observation - I'm struck by the number of times I've read a description in an old story of a scene that I had thought would not have existed in anyone's imagination until Hollywood special/optical effects had developed to the point of being able to realise them on screen. But no, evidently not.

Secretary wise, I only know that women started dominating that field (it was largely men to start) once the typewriter was invented, apparently because women generally had better dexterity and made for faster typists. That said, I'm not entirely sure that these things are typical typewriters. I've never heard the term "sounders" before, and I keep thinking of the image of a guy at a Morse code tapper thing, probably because of a small tv bit I've seen about a dispatcher.