Guest Blog: Interesting Short: The Antimacassar

Please welcome Clark to the blog who has come with an interesting short. The Antimacassar was a story by Greye La Spina and was first published in Weird Tales, Volume 41 (Issue 4) in 1949. Clark’s reading of it is from the British Library Tales of the Weird collection volume Queens of the Abyss, edited by Mike Ashley. The British Library series have proven to be fine volumes.

In this short story we follow Lucy Butterfield, a young woman who is staying as a guest at a farmhouse somewhere In the rural Haycock region, near Quakertown. She, as one does, locks her bedroom door at night, but can hear a child crying for her mother, the lady running the place (Mrs Renner), and telling her mother she's hungry. Lucy overhears Mrs Renner and Aaron the farmhand outside her room stating the door is locked, and of interest in this story, that they can't enter because there is honeysuckle in the room.

When Lucy is out of her room the following day, this disappears, but as she has heard that comment she opens her bedroom window and collects more from where it's growing all around the house. To say this displeases Mrs Renner would be an understatement, so Lucy agrees not to do it again. Of course, she has every intention of doing so, only to find it's all been cut away so she can't reach it. The antimacassar in question is also mentioned; it is a cloth chair covering produced on a weaving machine that Lucy recognises as one made by her company. We learn that she had recently been promoted due to the disappearance of her boss, and that she was actually trying to find her. She learns that this was where her manager had been upon finding one of her handkerchiefs with her initials. She finds 2 tyres on her car flat, which is used as an explanation for why she doesn't just leave and involve anyone in authority. That night, although she has locked her room and, hearing Aaron talk about a stake, she dreams she woke to find a child by her bed who leans forward to kiss her.

Obviously, this is a bite and the child is the vampire in question. Upon waking she finds 2 pinprick marks where she dreamt that she was "kissed". Resolving to confront Mrs Renner she tells her she knows what happened both to her and her boss. As she says this Aaron walks by with a stake and a hammer, and fortuitously Stan, her fiancé, appears. Before Mrs Renner can do anything, Aaron has staked the child vampire, and Mrs Renner faints. The explanation for the arrival of Stan is that the previous manager had weaved a message into the antimacassar, which gave the address, an SOS message, and mentioned vampires in shorthand. This felt slightly unnecessary and rushed, but was of little consequence to what was an enjoyable little story.

The story can be found in the volume mentioned above but it is also available at Wikisource, and my thanks to Clark for sharing this tale with a strange apotropaic, it’s the only one I can think of with honeysuckle being used for that.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK